Sky + Picture breaking up

[speedbird1]

My pace Sky + box which is about 18 months old started having problems with some of the chs breaking up. Now it has reached the stage where only a few chs are working and of course its not recording at all.
Now at times there are no Chs at all but unplugging the power and restoring sometimes gives back a few Chs.
Under services the indication is that only the second LNB has a signal.

Is my problem likely to be the LNB or the sky box. ??

Can anyone tell me which coax (or is it both) output takes the power to the LNB. ??

Thank You

 

[Crisbe]

Both cables take power to the LNB. If you have a dual output LNB you have to think of it as two seperate LNBs in one unit sharing the same feedhorn.

Are you sure your dish is okay, if it is on a wall of your house it is not unheard of for a dish to get knocked by someone being careless with a ladder (for example a window cleaner) or by children hitting it with a ball. The dish would only need to be a tiny bit out of alignment to reduce the signal quality enough that you would get picture break up. Check the signal quality using the signal test in the digibox menu. If you have a lot of signal strength but the quality is way down this could be the problem.

If you think this is unlikely to have happened and you have a friend/relative/neighbour (who has a working sky+ system) who will let you try your box in place of theirs you will see if it is your box which has the problem. Or if you can't do this you could buy a secondhand digibox for about £10 on fleabay and connect that to your downleads and prove if your dish is okay. Or alternatively, if someone will lend you a digibox for an hour you could try it on your downleads and see if it works on your dish. If it doesn't you know where your problem is.

 

[speedbird1]

Thanks for the detailed advice. It is unlikely the dish has been disturbed
as its high up and no kids, its been in the same spot for long long time and is very well anchored to the wall.
I have proved the sky + box is ok on another dish, works fine.
Put a normal sky box on suspect LNB and no signal being received.
In fact it shows no signal strength/quality what so ever.

I think the LNB has failed completly so I going to order a new one.
Any suggestions as to make or model, are all LNB suitable for HD
just in case I may upgrade in the future. ??
Thanks again for your assistance.

 

[Robbo]

What LNB you get depends on what type of dish you have.


If it is a a normal Sky dish zone 1 or zone 2 then you can pick up a Sky quad LNB from ebay for about a tenner. ebay search 'wistron sky quad'

If it is not a standard sky dish then a standard universal 40mm neck twin will do the job. It is not critical for 28E. ebay search 'twin lnb titanium 2nd'

Yes, there is no special requirement to receive HD, LNB wise.

 

[barrie.lamb]

Could be the co-ax cables between the LNB and box have you tried swopping the connections over, and also I had the same problem and there was water in the leads at the LNB end.