Confused Thicko Needs More than 4 Sky Connections Advice Please

gravitytolls

Hi all,

We have Sky+ in the lounge, Sky non+ in the bedroom, and have acquired 2 further boxes for the big boys rooms.

Now, I finally grasp that we can't have all the boxes and the Sky+ coming off the dish, but I don't know how to change this.

Should we just stick up (how innocent I am) another dish? What about these multiswitch things? I looked at an Octo something or other, but it might be too complicated to fit.

What do you recommend?

Now, we have a multiroom subscription, and I was under the impression that we could then add other boxes, as it's called 'multiroom', implying the use of boxes in multiple rooims. It appears I was wrong, as the nice chap at Sky told us we ned subscriptions for each box. He did offer us a free HD box with free installation and some other blah blah stuff (very heavily accented, I couldn't quite grasp it, and I've a feeling he didn't really grasp my query).

Anyhoo, I don't much want to commit to another tenner a month for HD (the lads will pay for their own multiroom), in fact, I'm not even sure if our five year old telly is HD!

So, really, what I'm asking after all this rambling is, what should I do?

Thanks.:D

spike7451

No way around it if you want the other 2 boxes connected to the existing set up,you need a Octo LNB on the dish.These are fairly simple to fit as they slide off the dish arm once you remove the retaining pin.then you just run 2 extra cables from the dish to where you want the other 2 boxes.
Multiroom does mean a seperate box per room however the chap at Sky is correct,you need an extra £10 sub per box.
This £10 'multiroom sub is effectivley a full price subscription discounted down to £10 per extra box.
Now if you do get the other 2 boxes connected & decide to go for the multiroom,you WILL need to have them connected to the phone as well.If you don't,then Sky will cancel all the £10 sub's & bill you full price sub's PER BOX until the phone lines are connected.It's to stop you adding your mom's Sky box to your account so she only pays £10 but lives at a different address.

Multi switches are no use as the feed to the boxes must come from the dish because when you change channels on the Sky box,the 'tuner' on the dish LNB changes to the new channel.

Now Sky won't come out to install the new boxes so your looking at an independant installer or a diy job.You can get Octo LNB's ect from here;

http://satandcable.com/content/sky-octo-lnb-sky-mini-dish-8-outputs

Also note,you will need to fit a microfilter to the phone extensions going to the new sky boxes.

TimothyEBaldwin

spike7451 wrote: »

Multi switches are no use as the feed to the boxes must come from the dish because when you change channels on the Sky box,the 'tuner' on the dish LNB changes to the new channel.

Not true at all. There are only 4 modes an LNB can be in, 2 frequency bands x 2 polarizations. A multiswitch has 4 inputs - one for each mode, and switches each output to the appropriate input, as selected by the receiver.

Some multiswicthes can be connected to quad/octo LNBs, others require a quattro LNB - which isn't switchable and therefore can't be used without a multiswitch.

See the Wikipedia article for more information.