SKY back to aerial

[Ula NI]

Hi there,
my Dad (who lives in Ireland) had a sky box installed years ago and cancelled a month ago as it was getting too pricey. Dad wants to connect a free view box now but the fascia plate on the wall is for sky aerial connection only (in Ireland when you cancel sky most of the channels on the box are then encrypted).
The assumption is that the person who installed the sky used the existing tv cable to connect to the sky dish and then changed the fascia plate in the living room....does this sound like it would happen?
My question is, can the coax revert to being for a terrestrial aerial?
If it can (silly question...) do you then need to disconnect it from the sky dish and reconnect it to the aerial?

Probably guessed i haven't a clue about this.
Any advice would be helpful.
thanks

 

[Doggit]

He wants a freesat box rather than a freeview box. It's the equivalent of a freeview box, but uses the old Sky dish rather than an aerial.

But the Sky box normally continues to receive the freeview chanels, plus a few extras (and only scrambles the chargeable chanels), so check it out before you go much further.

 

[JBR]

May I ask a simple question?

Is it possible to use an old Sky dish with a Freesat box, or does the dish need re-orienting?

 

[Doggit]

No adjustment necessary, you just plug in the freesat box, and away you go. It's obviously picking up the freesat signals off of the sky satelite - somehow.

 

[Lucid]

For the sake of completeness because you said you don't know much about this....... and also because others before you have asked similar questions:

The Freesat box is the simplest solution but there are a couple of things you should be aware of.

First (and I'm only mentioning this because there have been quite a few questions from people trying to receive Freeview via a satellite dish and wondering why it won't work ), Freesat doesn't provide a signal compatible with Freeview tuner in a TV. The dish only works with the Freesat box or a Sky box if he has that reinstalled.

Second, if his Sky box was hooked up to send a signal to a second TV in the house via aerial coax then that feature won't be available directly from the Freesat recorder.

 

[JBR]

Thanks Doggit and Lucid.

Good news, but I thought that perhaps the Sky satellite and the Freesat satellite might be different ones and in a different location in the sky!

Also, I realised that I'd need a Freesat box; Freeview is a terrestrial thing.

Actually, our Freeview reception is good and we probably don't need Freesat anyway. The only thing that occurred to me was the possibility of a new 4G mobile mast making an appearance and compromising our TV reception. Of course, that might never happen.

 

[winston1]

Good news, but I thought that perhaps the Sky satellite and the Freesat satellite might be different ones and in a different location in the sky!

It is not Sky's satellite or Freesat's satellite. It belongs to SES Astra.

 

[JBR]

Thanks Winston. Convenient that everything's in one place, I suppose!

 

[Nozzle]

it's not that hard to re-positiona dish though, there's a website, I can't remember the name, where you drop a pin on Google Maps where your dish will be located, then you tell it which satellite you want to receive signal from (Astra 2E I believe) and it gives you the direction and azimuth.

Get on your ladder with a protractor, compass and signal meter. Set it up approximately, then use the signal meter to further improve the alignment thus signal strength. Go to your sat box, see the signal strength/quality and attempt a tune.

Repeat if the results are crap.

Nozzle

 

[JBR]

it's not that hard to re-positiona dish though, there's a website, I can't remember the name, where you drop a pin on Google Maps where your dish will be located, then you tell it which satellite you want to receive signal from (Astra 2E I believe) and it gives you the direction and azimuth.

Get on your ladder with a protractor, compass and signal meter. Set it up approximately, then use the signal meter to further improve the alignment thus signal strength. Go to your sat box, see the signal strength/quality and attempt a tune.

Repeat if the results are crap.

Nozzle

Thanks.

Hopefully, if I need to use it, it will still be in the correct orientation!

 

[ericmark]

Second, if his Sky box was hooked up to send a signal to a second TV in the house via aerial coax then that feature won't be available directly from the Freesat recorder.

My free to air satellite box does have a coax output to a second TV, however it does not work with a digi eye you have to change channels in the room with the box.

The big difference between free to air and Sky is the electronic program guide (EPG) my free to air box is very poor at finding what's on, and to record although you can enter times, much easier if it shows on the guide then it's a simple click and it auto names the program recorded, although some times it names it for the program before one recorded.

The other big change is with a free to air box you can delete all the channels you can't get, so you don't wade through channels which will not work.

Also often free to air does not order the channels, so you can't simply look in the paper and see a program you want to see on 115 you can't simply type in 115 it will likely be something completely different, you have to hunt for ITV 3. However on the plus side you can normally re-order the programs so you can set it ITV, ITV+1, ITV2, ITV2+1, ITV3 etc. You can also select your region once there is no card in a Sky box it reverts to London so 101 is BBC1 London.

Some free to air boxes only give you now and next, others do try and give you a few days, but getting the whole week as with a sky box you would be lucky to get that.

I think free to air describes all the satellite boxes, there is also a Freesat which I think has a better program guide, however some boxes have extras like connections to a rotator so you can watch more than just found on Sky. Also some with twin inputs, my son-in-law has one with duel inputs and can watch Turkish TV as well as British.

In Hong Kong with Star TV in my flat they did use the same wires as the normal TV and swapped the plate, Star TV's advert was if you pay for TV then you have no adverts. Sorry to say Sky is not like that. But normally in a house the Sky is completely independent of freeview. My box has both the LNB (Sky) and the aerial plugged in and you can watch either from same box you don't really know which is which.

The free to air box I have is HD, and what was a surprise is there are many more free HD channels on the free to air box than on the HD Sky box (We don't pay for HD).

There are in my area a few free channels on freeview which are not free with satellite, however there are more satellite channels than freeview channels. I personally find freeview a pain as it is forever wanting one to re-tune, satellite also changes and every so often it's good to rescan but it does not put up annoying notices telling you to re-turn now.

Although in theory my free to air box can send a UHF analogue and a freeview signal to another TV we find they interfere with each other so you have to decide which.

 

[JBR]

Also often free to air does not order the channels, so you can't simply look in the paper and see a program you want to see on 115 you can't simply type in 115 it will likely be something completely different, you have to hunt for ITV 3. However on the plus side you can normally re-order the programs so you can set it ITV, ITV+1, ITV2, ITV2+1, ITV3 etc. You can also select your region once there is no card in a Sky box it reverts to London so 101 is BBC1 London.

I think this could be a good idea for Freeview too. As things are the order of channels is, in many cases, quite illogical. It might be helpful if, for example, all the BBC channels were located together in numerical order and the same for other TV companies.

 

[ericmark]

I think this could be a good idea for Freeview too. As things are the order of channels is, in many cases, quite illogical. It might be helpful if, for example, all the BBC channels were located together in numerical order and the same for other TV companies.

With the IceCrypt set top box I have, it does both freeview and satellite, and if you search for channels it puts freeview first and follows the freeview order.

However once scanned you can if you want re-order the channels as you want them, if you wish with a mixture of satellite and terrestrial so you could have ITV 3 terrestrial followed ITV 3 +1 satellite, it's up to you.

The cheap 32" TV from Asda a Polaroid does not have the freeview in the normal order, from 1 to 100 is analogue and 101 to 600 is digital random order and you can change the order, if the electronic program guide works A1 it does not matter, however the IceCrypt set top box is slow and unpredictable as to what it will show in the guide, it seems to depend on which channel you are watching as to what the guide will show, so unlike the Sky box where you can see a week in advance with nearly every program shown what is on. With the IceCrypt it's really hit an miss, it is the same with Freeview our old Panasonic has a really good guide, however my mothers TV's are no where near as good, again hit and miss how far in advance you can go.

With Sky I could not understand why people bought the TV times, however with other TV's and set top boxes I can understand why, problem is there are so many free to air programs now, and all the paper guides miss out loads.