Sky TV. Poor quality on a just few programmes.

[norsey]

I'm getting poor quality picture and sound on several programmes including BBC1 and ITV. Quality is excelent on all the other channels. Sky say I need a £60 engineer visit to check the dish and it's LNB (the bit sticking out of the dish). My signal strength is 90% and signal quality about 40%.
I resent paying a Sky engineer as they get their £600 per year in rental.
Do they ever fix the problem for free, if the alternative is that I cancel the contract, which I'm prepared to do?
Alternatively I see that LNBs cost only a few £'s to buy. Is it straight forward to replace myself without any TV equipment for lining up etc.

 

[kkynaston]

Do you have sky or Sky+?

The reason that I ask is that if you call out and threaten to cancel they could offer a free service call or a reduced price upgrade

I have managed to get a compltely free sky+ upgrade for friends before

It is most likely the LNB that is at fault though with those symptoms.
Easiest way to check is to take your box to a friends house who has a working system and try those channels.
If you get the same result it will be the tuner in the box.

 

[norsey]

I've got bog-standard Sky. The thing is, I am a BT broadband user and have their BT Vision box on my TV. Free useage and probably does all that Sky + does (stop whilst out of the room, go back, record 2 programmes at once, 80 hours of recordings etc.). I've only still got Sky to watch their films and sport channels and that's not really worth the £50 a month - but my wife wants it !!! Otherwise I'd just stick with free BT.

 

[GaryB]

The most likely reason for this is slight dish misalignment. Sky's signals come from a mixture of the Astra 2A/B/C/D and Eurobird satellites. Astra is at 28.2E and Eurobird is at 28.5E. Dishes are normally aligned between the two satellites and receive roughly equal signal from each. The 0.3 degree separation between isn't normally significant, but if the dish is slightly misaligned, signals from one of them will usually be weaker than the other.

You can see which channels are on which satellite at: Lyngsat

 

[pompeyal]

If your quality is down that far it is probably due to a rotational error at you dish rather than a pointing problem as you have good signal strength. Does your LNB have any rotational adjustment, I know they use to have but maybe on some of the newer systems they have become cheep and nasty and had this option discarded. If it has adjustment on the LNB, try rotating it a degree at a time each way and see if the quality improves from there. If you have no adjustment you can twist the support the LNB is mounted but be careful because you can screw the whole thing, dont go too mad.