Sky+ 2nd feed?

RichyRich

Good afternoon everyone. Hope you enjoyed your extra hour last night!

I'm hoping that someone will be able to help me with what I hope is a relatively easy question.

We had Sky installed on Tuesday and, as we live in a block of flats, it's connected to the communal dish. However, the installer (who was a contractor) informed us that as there is only one Sky feed from the socket we can only record or watch one channel at a time (i.e. can't record a different channel to the one we're watching).

He said that this is common in blocks of flats and the likelihood is that there are two feeds to the socket but only one feed out of it, and that this is generally done by developers so that they can charge a £100 fee to open up the second feed :mad:

Obviously I'm less than happy about this so what I want to know is how easy is it to do it myself? If I looked inside and saw that there are indeed two feeds then went to Maplins or somewhere could I get a new face plate and connect myself up to the 2nd feed so that Sky+ works properly? Or am I resigned to biting my lip and paying some extortionate fee to the developer for the rectification of a design flaw that they engineereed?

Thanks for any help!

Cheers
Rich

Kurtis_Blue

OK, it may be live, simply swap the spare cable to the one connected to the facia plate and see, if it works A ok then just get a twin feed sat facia from screwfix and away you go.

It may be that the other end of the cable is not yet connected to the headend, or maybe a TV feed.


In which case you will need to call out the maintenance co. for your building as the cabinets will probably be locked and/or there may not be a spare feed left.
But having the 2nd cable in situ is half the battle.

£100 is not extortionate and it is not really a design flaw they have to design and construct to some form of budget, some flats have the full monty incl DAB, FM and CCTV and some do not you takes your pick when purchasing.

RichyRich

Thanks for your help.

spike7451

One of the feeds may go to a tap bank where the incoming feeds off the satalite are split & amplified before going onto to the flats.The other may be connected to a tap bank for an Airial.If the is an airial on the side of the flats,then this will more likely be the case.If both cables run into the same place & you can find yours,you may be able to move the airail one from that tap bank onto the sky one.
Came across this quite a lot working for Sky..