Apartment building satellite dish

vyle

I live in an apartment block with 5 other flats. We have a satellite dish and each flat has a tv point with aerial, radio and satellite outputs, but only one of each.

I've got myself a freesat box and I'm using the loop through method to give me a limited twin tuner functionality.

I'd ideally like to have a proper twin feed coming through, but I'm not sure how to go about it. Has anybody got experience of getting a twin feed set up in a similar situation? I know most dishes have 4 lnb outputs, but when the dish is feeding 6 flats it may have many more...it'd seem silly for a developer to include a satellite dish without the option to have Sky + or anything similar.

I don't know where to start my enquiries.

davb

I think the communal systems are specials. If you fancy a bit of reading up, you could look at what Sky offer here.

fwor

Is it possible for you to get close enough to the communal dish to see the LNB and any associated gear? Anything you could find on make/model would yield more info.

It's highly likely that the developer will have bought equipment with just the minimum number of outlets they could get away with - the apartment would not sell for more money if there were spare LNB outlets available than if there were not...

m_13

We live in an apartment block (sounds posher than flat) and share one dish among 61 apartments. We can't have Sky+ or similar although it has been suggested that we could persuade another neighbour higher up to relinquish their feed and allow us to use their cable which passes along the back of our socket in a shared service space.

It may be different with such a small number of people sharing the dish. Do any of your neighbours not require their feed?

Inactive

Apartments are usually fed from a specific type of system that is quite different to a standard dish set-up.

Bikertov

m_13 wrote: »

We live in an apartment block (sounds posher than flat) and share one dish among 61 apartments. We can't have Sky+ or similar although it has been suggested that we could persuade another neighbour higher up to relinquish their feed and allow us to use their cable which passes along the back of our socket in a shared service space.

It may be different with such a small number of people sharing the dish. Do any of your neighbours not require their feed?

If there are 61 flats, then this will be a proper distribution system. Can they not drop another cable down the service space ?

For the OP, it may be you also have a system like this. To explain :

When you get a full distribution system, you usually have a Quatro LNB, rather than a Quad LNB. This is then fed to a multe switch, which allows each feed out to get access to each of the four satelite signals - High and Low, in both Horizontal and Vertical polarisation.

m_13

I wish they could Bikertov but we are running at maximum on the feeds and so it's a no. Frustratingly many of our elderly neighbours don't even use their feed, only freeview. Luckily Sky spend their time putting on repeats so we record most things and it's very unlikely we watch anything live!

Bikertov

You may well find that there is only one cable that feeds both the satelite signal and the terestrial combined. The faceplate then splits out the two signal again. If that is the case, you can't take their sat feed, as they would also lose their 'normal' TV signal.

vyle

fwor wrote: »

Is it possible for you to get close enough to the communal dish to see the LNB and any associated gear? Anything you could find on make/model would yield more info.

It's highly likely that the developer will have bought equipment with just the minimum number of outlets they could get away with - the apartment would not sell for more money if there were spare LNB outlets available than if there were not...

Sadly not. It's on the wrong side of the building to where I am and wouldn't be able to see without scaling the walls like Spiderman .

Thanks for your input everyone. If I can catch my neighbour I'll see if they have sky+ and find out how they did it (if so).

vyle

Interestlingly, Sky turned up a few mins ago and were shocked and appalled that I was using a freesat box on the sky dish.

they then said the dish is being overloaded so are going to prioritise sky subscribers.He tried telling me that i'd be worth ditching my freesat box (which I just paid £200 for) to go for sky SD because it'd look better on a HD tv anyeway.

Riiiiiiiight....

I'd have bought a digital PVR but my digital signal keeps being loopy and dropping out randomly, so I'm happy with bbcHD and the ability to record.

I didn't bother asking about the twin feed thing, but I did find something interesting which I wish I could scan in (i dont have a scanner).

When I first moved in, I got a tv connection pack consisting of an aerial cable, a splitter, and some diagrams.

Behind the tv are two plates. one has and FM socket, a satellite socket and a tv aerial socket.

The second plate just has a tv output.

One diagram states that one can connect both the TV outs to a splitter to feed a tv/vcr.

Underneath is a diagram entitled "connnecting sky and terrestrial TV"

On this one, it shows to use the sat output (obviously) and the second TV plate is "lead from skybox 2nd outlet"

How does that work? I can't screw my lnb lead into it.... needless to say im confused.