Rubbish Sky Signal - Any advice

[fizzwheel]

Our house backs into a very steep hill. That hill is very overgrown with trees etc etc.

I dont know who owns the land the trees are on, but I know that I dont. Our Sky plays up on windy / rainy days and the picture can get heavily pixalated or completely cut out.

I had a Sky installer round to have a look at it, and he intially replaced the LMB in our dish as it was full up with water and re-postioned the dish and it has made an improvement, but its still not showing a very good signal quality. His advice was to mount the dish onto a longer pole so that the dish was over the tree line as that was what was causing the interfance.

As his company dont seem to understand the concept of "I pay you money, you provide me a service" and dont seem to want to come round and sort it can I do anything by contacting sky directly.

I dont want a free upgrade or anything like that and I dont want to cancel our contract either. But a few people have mentioned to me that a Sky+ upgrade might be worth contemplating as it uses a different dish and copes better with low signal input.

I'm going to contact another local company and get them to come round and take a look to.

I had thought about asking my neighbours who owns the land but I suspect that its a grey area and also I bet cutting the trees down to size will be a costly exercise if I have it done properly.

Anybody on here work for Sky that could offer some advice or has anybody had similar experiences, what did you do to fix it ?

Ta

Somebody just rang my landline and asked my if my sky TV was working?! I don't have sky tv....

I just upgraded to Sk+ its great but the dish is the same that I had before. They just changed the receiver thingy.
Would the council not help if you said the trees were becoming a danger to your property?

Originally Posted by SV-net

I just upgraded to Sk+ its great but the dish is the same that I had before. They just changed the receiver thingy.
Would the council not help if you said the trees were becoming a danger to your property?

Sky works on line of sight. The satellite receiver (the dish) points directly at the satellite in the sky. Anything in the way will degrade the signal strength. If you have an obstacle in the way causing signal degradation you can only do two things. Move the obstacle or move the dish. In your case the only thing you can do is move the dish. He was right about getting a longer pole.

Just the smallest degree of movement can make a big difference to the signal picked up. Just think about the distance between the dish and satellite a tiny movement of the dish is going to be a mile away by the time it reaches the satellite. On the flip side of that, a movement of a foot upward may just be enough for you to get that pinpoint line of sight required to have a brilliant signal.

I have a scaffold pole bolted to a fence post and the dish mounted at the top of the pole. Much for the same reasons. I live in a dip and can't even get any sort of signal at all on a normal TV antenna.

[fizzwheel]

Originally Posted by BigApe

Move the obstacle or move the dish. In your case the only thing you can do is move the dish. He was right about getting a longer pole.

Thats my thoughts, I dont really see this as Sky's problem to solve its mine. I'm going to give up with company A as they really dont seem to understand the concept of customer service.

They promised me an engineer on Tuesday afternoon and he never turned up and never had a phone call to say he wasnt coming. I took half a day holiday on tuesday as well which is irritating. I phoned their office yesterday morning and very politely asked what had happened to the engineer the girl I spoke didnt seem to know why he hadnt turned up and promised me a call back with an update, I still havent had a call back I would have thought it wouldnt have taken much effort to ring back and say "I'm still trying to sort it out" but alas no... Theres a few other companies in the local area and I'll give one of those a try tomorrow and see what I can sort out.

if u get it sorted out fizz get sky+ its great!

sky+ is great, but not that bad without it. We've had building works next to us for last 3 months, assumed the scaffolding they had up was causing interference, but now they've actually taken it down, we stilll can't receve the signal. Time to call a local aeriel service.

But we've knocked down our sky subscription to the minimum, seeing as most of what we watch can be downloaded.

[tigersaw]

Since the dish is an offset and is 'looking' at a much higher angle than the setting of the dish would make you believe, adding even a small amount of height can often make enough difference.

I have sky in the back of the house and virgin in the front, its constant signal drops are bloody annoying, and there customer service is awful, which surprised me as I through Virgin was bad.

Originally Posted by flibble

sky+ is great, but not that bad without it. We've had building works next to us for last 3 months, assumed the scaffolding they had up was causing interference, but now they've actually taken it down, we stilll can't receve the signal. Time to call a local aeriel service.

But we've knocked down our sky subscription to the minimum, seeing as most of what we watch can be downloaded.

As I said before, it only has to be knocked out of position by a very small amount for you to loose your good signal. It only has to be out a tiny bit more to loose all signal.

There are two things you can do. The first is to give it little tweaks whilst someone else is watching the TV. Yup the old fashioned way. I believe sky box's have a signal strength meter display somewhere in the setup. (It's been a number of years since I qualified and not used those particular skills so could be wrong about that bit) OR you can call in an 'expert' who will more than likely plug in a spectrum analyser. It's basically an posh signal strength meter, he will the 'dial in' (up a bit, right a bit) the dish for the best signal.

Personally, I'd go down the old fashioned route. Well it's a damn site cheaper.

Either way, when you have got it set back up and the dish is in the optimum position, go out and mark all the 'moving' parts with tip-ex or some such thing similar. At least then, should it happen again, you'll be able to see at a glance if your dish needs re-adjusting or if the issue is something else.

The cable can breakdown too. Moisture getting in from the dish receiver is the usual suspect.