Sky TV. Commercial property

eportdave

Hi. Recently got sky TV in our apartment.it's a communal dish with only 1 line in (for the tv) to our apartment. We love the package we have but the only problem is that there is only 1 port in to the sky box meaning that if we want to record anything we have to have the sky box on the channel it's recording. Not good at all.
My question is,if I ring sky, can I ask them to put a second TV line in so that we can record while watching another channel? If not, how could we do this or is it impossible to do.
Dave

HappyMJ

eportdave wrote: »

Hi. Recently got sky TV in our apartment.it's a communal dish with only 1 line in (for the tv) to our apartment. We love the package we have but the only problem is that there is only 1 port in to the sky box meaning that if we want to record anything we have to have the sky box on the channel it's recording. Not good at all.
My question is,if I ring sky, can I ask them to put a second TV line in so that we can record while watching another channel? If not, how could we do this or is it impossible to do.
Dave

It's not possible.

It is but it's your freeholder that would put the secondary lines in for all of the flats. That would require a larger LNB and possibly larger dish or a secondary dish.

We have 12 flats in the building requiring a 12 port LNB. If everyone had 2 ports each we would need a 24 port LNB. They won't do that.

You can usually find the program you want to record on at a different time during the day or night so you can record that one instead. Game of Thrones for example is shown as a first run at 2AM. I doubt you'll be watching TV at 2AM so the box can be on Sky Atlantic.

Neil_Jones

If appropriate, you could always ask Sky or somebody to put another dish up and use this instead. There is no obligation to use the communal aerial.

of course if you're 12 floors up in a block of flats installing your own dish won't be an option.

Unfortunately you can't split the incoming signal into two for technical reasons. You may have luck with the little portable caravan type ones if you have a window facing the right way but unlikely to receive a decent signal through glass.

May be a case of put up with, unfortunately and as say, record stuff overnight or from your on demand.

rtho782

The signal from the satellite is very high bitrate, very high frequency.

This frequency/bandwidth wouldn't fit down a standandard coax cable, you'd need horribly expensive cables to transmit the signal.

So, you have an LNB (Low Noise Block Downconverter) which takes this freqency and shifts it downwards. The issue is that there isn't enough bandwidth for all the channels, so they are split into 4 groups:

High Band, Horizontal Polarisation
High Band, Vertical Polarisation
Low Band, Horizontal Polarisation
Low Band, Vertical Polarisation

A single LNB, or each port on a quad/octo LNB, can switch between any of these 4 bands.

Your dish will have a "Quattro" LNB. This has 4 fixed outputs, one of each of these. This will go to a distribution amplifier in the loft somewhere, with one port for each flat.

These ports to the flats then switch between each of these inputs.

Sky+ Boxes can function in "Single Feed" mode, but then you can't record two channels or record one while watching another live. In theory, if the two channels happened to be in the same band, it would be technically possible, but I'm not sure if the boxes do this.

This is probably more info than you cared about, but hopefully explains why there is more to it than just adding another cable

onomatopoeia99

rtho782 wrote: »

Your dish will have a "Quattro" LNB. This has 4 fixed outputs, one of each of these. This will go to a distribution amplifier in the loft somewhere, with one port for each flat.

Distribution amplifier is more commonly known as a "multiswitch" and they are available with differing numbers of outputs, so the building owner (or flat management company, potentially) could upgrade it to allow all the flats to have two feeds, though running new cables would probably mean a lot of disruption.