Sky Plus help

[linkyplumb]

Good evening.
I currently have a standard Sky box.I have the opportunity of buying a couple of various second hand Sky +.
The boxes are a thomson one and an amstrad one.Which one is the best?
And is it just a case of disconnecting our current box and putting our viewing card into the new one.
Thanks in advance
Graham

 

[ChrisFrost]

The card will probably need pairing with the new box. You should be able to do that with a quick phone call to Sky.

The 'Plus' services - pausing live TV, recording etc - are accessible if you give Sky some money. Just buying the box on it's own doesn't do the trick. Have a look
herefor more info and costs.

 

[Chukka63]

you will need a new dish basically and new cabling as sky+ uses 2 cables so it can record 1 channel while you watch another basically

 

[ChrisFrost]

...of course, yes. Well, the dish part will be fine. The LNB (the thing where the wires connect) will need to be updated though. The next size up from a single-output LNB is a quad - so that's 4 connections - 2 per Sky+ box

 

[gblades]

Ideally new LNB and an extra cable although often there is an option in the engineers menu to enable it to work with just one cable feed for people in flats who can only have a single cable feed. It does mean you can record only one program at a time though.

Until the card is paired and the Sky+ service added the box wont be able to record.

The amstrad box is probably the better one as the thompsons tended to suffer from unreliable power supplies. Any box can however suffer from a bad hard disk so no guarantees.