Sky Installation: Whos responsibility?

confused31_2

JimmyDeemo wrote: »

littlemissmoney, thanks for the idea anyway.

I see what you mean, the tenant is a friend of mine you see (we did everything by the book though, AST, guarantor, etc.) so they didn't really ask for me to sort it out. More like 'hey i thought this was supposed to work', which was my sentiments as well.

The thing is that they have already paid sky for the 'installation'. The communal equipment is not Sky's and was put in place by a contractor, so thats the difference.

What i'm going to do is find out if anyone else is recieving the full signal, and if so then i will say that normal sky is availible unless they want the contractors details to sort it themselves. If no one else has sky, i'm pretty sure its the communal equiptment and that should be sorted as thats what i pay a maintainance fee for.

I think if all else fails, i'll just give the tenants permission to ring sky up and get them to slap a normal dish on the side and drill through the walls (like they would do with any other place).

Thanks again, will let you know what happens anyway.

they wont need a dish they will need a multi lnb, what i think has happened is there are not enough feeds from the current lnb for them to use sky plus, maybe there are no spare lnb slots for them to use, but i know you need to have two cables going to sky plustto tenable it to work correctly.

The lnb is the thing the cable comes from the dish and plugs into the box, if theres only one cable going into the box they will only be able to tape 1 channel ansd that will be the channel they are watching.

they need to replace the current lnb with one like this then run 2 cables from their dish to the sky plus box.
all they need is one of these for 10 pound and some coax cable

http://www.uk-satellite-tv.co.uk/digiboxshop_59489/prod_316616-0134-Quad-LNB-for-UK-minidish.html

Ignite

Hi

Most of you are thinking small scale domestic at the moment. In a communal aerial system, things are done totally differently. Somewhere, there will be a comms cupboard. In this, there will be 4 feeds from the satellite dish (for all of the different combinations of band and polarization - from a quattro LNB). There will also be a feed from the terrestrial aerial as well. These all go into a distribution amp (or a few if there needs to be a large number of outputs), and from this amp, feeds are run to the wall sockets in the flats.

In this case, it sounds like only one of the sockets has been made live. It will either be a case of the other cable being connected at one of the ends, or it might be that instead of their being 2 cables run from the comms room, that the other cable is a loop cable going off to another room.

I would say that you need to have a chat with the installer and find out what the original spec was for. The installer will be different from the electrician. The electrician will have run all of the cables, but will then subcontract the aerial side of the install to a specialist installer.

jaywhoopee

QTPie wrote: »

Doing that would be hell... Development are managed by Peverrel - who are a major waste of time (hard to contact, take ages to do anything, couldn't arrange a p*ss up in a brewery if their lives depended on it :rolleyes: ). Anything communal has to go through them. Also the development is pretty big: about 24 flats and maybe 40 houses. Changing the communal dish wouldn't be cheap and may wouldn't support it... Plus we don't have a residents' committee to organise people and drum up support.
QT

I believe Sky have a department to coordinate installations in multi occupancy buildings. Mainly aimed at getting "critical mass" for a new shared install, but they may be able to help upgrade an existing one.

googler

If you want to check the presence or absence of a dish signal from within any of your flats, i.e. verifying the installers' work, you can buy one of the hand-held devices that the engineers use to align the dish; it shows if a valid signal is coming through without connecting up a digibox.

Either that or speak nicely to a local installer and see if he or she will lend you one for an afternoon.

Where to find them ; £19.95 or less, at http://www.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!/accs/page6.htm

I have no afiliation with satcure.

googler

OK, so I can't post links - google 'satfinder meter satcure' then...

anotherpaul_2

I'm curious (without knowing a lot about sat dishes...). If it's a communal system, presumably there's one dish with two LNBs - and a cable from each LNB running to each flat? So, each LNB is shared.

If this is the case, can't you just get a cable splitter, connect it to the working cable and turn it into two? For a single user installation, potentially sharing the same LNB would give you a degraded signal, but for a communal system, its shared anyway, so you wouldn't notice.

But maybe I just don't understand and there's some other equipment in the communal system that means the LNBs are not shared.

ETA: Should have done my research first! No, it doesn't work.

confused31_2

you have 1 lnb with upto 4 feeds of it, but to use sky plus you have to have 2 feeds

lukeface

Has your tenant already got the Sky plus box with them? I only ask this because i recently had my sky+ box installed and when the Sky engineer came he said only one feed was working, but when he put the connections in they surprisingly still worked!

Maybe this is due to one of the feeds being a output and one a input feed? Im prob wrong but i still would get the tenant to check it out to see if its working or not first before spending needless cash as in my situation it still worked!

Good luck!