hi guys just recently my sky has decided to go funny on me. At present the weather outside is dry and not windy at all but channel 4 keeps frezzing and stopping and this is not the only one. Channel 5 is the worst !

is anyone else getting this or is it my dish

cheers

its never happened to me, i think its ur dish, have you tired contacting the sky people?

Channel 4 and Five OK here.

It could be one of:-
1. Dish alignment.
2. LNB faulty
3. Water in cable.
4. Loose connector.
5. Faulty digibox.
6. Obscuration of signal.

Try a process of elimintion/swopping known good components to find the fault.

I suggest you try this yourself before paying for a Sky callout.

yeh iv checked on the system status on the menu and the signal quality and signal strength seem to be dropping and increasing every so often.

i did think to ring sky but then they are only gona charge some stupid money for a simple job

The Signal strength/quality indicators on the box aren't really a very good indicator as they tend to show the situation on the default frequency which is very often also the strongest signal. Not only do the individual transponders have different characteristics but also you have contend with multiple satellites which aren't necessarily set up to transmit to the same footprint areas.

If the indicator is falling, even on what may be the strongest signal, then its a sure bet that some of the weaker signals are getting corrupted so your problem is almost certainly one of those mentioned by 007.4. Dish alignment is always the first thing to check due to its susceptibility to wind and other environmental factors.

It sounds a bit like the dish alignment to me. Where I used to work fit Sky and we had a lot of people come back to us with pretty much the same problem saying some channels worked but not others. Turns out the fitter we were using was using the wrong alignment setting on his Sat meter so they were slightly off.

You can get cheap meters from electrical shops for about £10. They're no where near as sophisticated as a fitters meter but they will tell you how strong the sat signal is to the satallite you're currently aligned to so you can adjust your dish. Maybe something worth trying before forking out for an engineer.

if its perfectly dry and no wind then even if its off slightly it should be ok. is channel 5 ok throughout the day (i see you posted at nearly 5pm) ive seen this loads of times as i specialise in problems that sky cant/wont sort out.

channels fine all day then around tea time they start playing up, sometimes theyll go off friday pm and theyre back monday morning, with channel 5showing it the worse.

if this is the case then someone local to you has a radar detector in their car that theyre leaving turned on when theyre home. have a look in the windscreens of cars around you to find it and ask the owner to turn it off.

youd be surprised how common this is, sky know about it but wont tell you, theyll charge a call out and send an engineer, but they havent told their engineers about this.

hope it helps

dd

thanks for all the repiles watching my skybox since 3pm has been a nightmare all the way to now. channels keep stopping and makes watching sky a nightmare !! Does anybody have a link for a shop where they sell these meters ??

But thinking about it my box was ok last night about 8pm ( i think) i will check it again today but if anyone could post me a link that would be great but i will post back after 8

can you try your box in a friends house, if its fine there then its your dish/cable or outside interference, if its still bad then its your box

yeh i'll try it next door or i will ask them and see what there picture quality is like. I asked them a few days ago they said there's was fine but i'll try it at the same time that mine fails at