sky dish and box problem!!

hardinggina

hi there i hope some one can help, we have installed a sky dish and have an old sky box but the card we have from sky is a white card but have been told by sky it is disabled as it was from when we was going to have sky installed in a new property but didnt move in, in the end. but now when we tried to use it in our new property it has been disabled as i said before.
now what i want to know is is there a way we can receive a signal from the dish to the box with out a card, sky said we need to purchase a freesat from sky card which i dont mind but if there is another way i would rather that lol as it costs money, if i was to buy a blue sky card off some one are these likely to work or are these disabled once the user who last owned it has received the new white card??
i hope this all makes sense.
thanks in advance.

Browntoa

old cards will not work , you need the freesat from Sky card

hardinggina

ok thanks, well i dont mind buying a card tbh, but how do i solve the issue of not getting a signal.

Tubbss

hi, not wanting to state the obvious, but are you certain you have aligned the dish correctly?

penrhyn

You don't need a viewing card to receive most of the free to view channels.

I suspect your set up has problems, have you checked the signal strength/quality in setup?

hardinggina

no any ideas are gratefully received it is on the wall lol, but as for being aligned im not 100% sure tbh we have pointed it in the same direction as others and tried moving it abit to see if we get anything but if we need to do something else to the box ie. reset something or press something for it to trigger it, it is a standard sky box and dish with 1 lnb it was my father in laws old one as they upgraded to hd so we thought(maybe thinking wasnt such a good idea) that with our old card we have but its not so old as it is a white one but it has been disabled (we didnt know this at the time of putting up the dish, we found this out after putting it up and ringing sky but they tried to get us to sign back up with them, then after failing told us about the freesat with sky card for £25 which is fine but we still need to find a signal lol, and their dish and box we would get the free channels that sky transmit!! but it seems it not quite that easy!!

penrhyn

You can buy a cheap satellite finder to align your dish to, remember that the satellite is in space over the equator so alignment needs to be precise.

http://www.maplin.co.uk/satellite-finder-48325

spannerzone

You'll be very lucky to get a signal just by pointing it the same direction as the neighbours- you're trying to locate a signal that's 22,236 miles from earth and it's the size of a dot giving out a few watts of power so careful alignment is essential! a dish movement of a centimetre or so left/right/up/down can make a dish usable to unusable.....

It's possible to align if you can see a TV while very slowly moving the dish and using the Sky signal meter but it's a bit crude and hit or miss... a signal meter as mentioned above is easier... otherwise you need to get an installer around with a meter to do it.

If you get no signals such as BBC1, BBC2 etc then it's a signal/dish problem as they don't require any card.

hardinggina

ok thanks for the advice guys i will get hold of a sattellite finder and see if that does anything if not i might just bite the bullet and get sky round and then cancel it in my cooling off period thus getting free install and then ftv channels also :-/

asbokid

It's definitely a Sky Digital box? If it's a really old box, it might be for the old analogue signals. Not sure if analogue signals are still being broadcast from the Astra satellites. Vague recollection that overseas broadcasters adopted the old frequencies when Sky moved to digital. Starting point viz alignment is to use a compass. Get the feel for whether next door's leylandii are in the way. There are satellite alignment calculators on the internet, such as http://www.satsig.net/spectrum-analyser.htm .

hardinggina

yes its definatly a digital box its a pace one it has sky digibox on it and dvb in the corner, i say old its not that old maybe a 2 years or so?? and as for trees etc we are at the highest point of our village so there is nothing in the way i just think it need some tweeking about tbh so the next step will be to try the finder and see what comes of that..thanks for the link