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SKY TV in Shetland


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A lot of people have been caught out recently with cold callers regarding Sky tv problems in shetland. Your only reliable repair plan in shetland is with SKY TV themselfs. if you have a problem with your Sky digital system phone Sky and this will cost you £65 for a standard service call and you will receive a 90 day warrenty with any work carried out. Or set up a repair plan with Sky costing approx £100 per year. the other companys that cold call have no engineers or equipment on the island and take ages to sort out a service call ! be warned. If in doubt Phone Sky. Hope this helps

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Guest Anonymous

When I was doing repairs on Sky systems as an independent repairer, I had many calls from people who had been told by Sky that they had no service representative on Shetland, which was wrong.

In the case of warranty repairs I always gave the customer the relevant information to prove to Sky that their agent was indeed North Lea Developments. In some cases if I hadn't done that folk could have been given the run round in the Sky system for months.

Basically, Sky's call centre staff haven't got a clue, so don't trust a word they say.

North Lea always, as far as I can see from experience, gave a standard of service which was a tad beyond the crappy service which Sky normally expect of their engineers.

And I have to admit, that given the abusive nature of some customers who happen to miss a football match because their dish blows away in a gale, I'd give top marks to North Lea for sticking with Sky for so long. :D

I personally couldn't hack it and escaped. :wink: :lol:

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It is one of those industries that gets a lot of criticism. How the hell do you install an all-weather dish when Sky only provide a piece of perforated tin?

 

My first couple of encounters with North Lea Developments were not of the sort with which I would give them praise. The job they did was shoddy to say the least.

 

The last time they were along I made a point of saying about the dish fixtures. To be fair, they have made the effort this time. The dish is fixed better than it has ever been in the past.

 

However...common courtesy would suggest that rather than a grunt and a flash of a builders ass out of shell-suit bottoms they could at least communicate nicely.

 

Oh...and guys, it doesn't take much to pick up the cable ties and cable-grips that you pulled out the wall. Or the nuts, bolts and old dish parts. Poor old dog running around doesn't really anticipate nor like finding these bits embedded in its foot...

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^^^

 

I'll second the cable tie comment. 'NLD1' left a lovely mess around the house after they'd finished the job. Perhaps if I'd grunted at them more they'd have understood I was a member of their species and they'd have shown a little more respect. Huh!

 

As for the 'all weather' aspect, how do you expect a dish to last when it's scratched and rusting when newly installed. Sky wouldn't replace it when I complained btw.

 

I enquired with Sky about get someone else in to do the work the next time I called (a couple of years later) but Sky weren't playing ball. NLD came back and made the exact same mess. It's just pure laziness in my opinion.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Some of the sky channel pictures have been "freezing" up this afternoon and are still doing so this evening. Has anyone else got this problem today? Why does the problem only affect some of the channels?

I wanted to watch Fox News (509) which is hopeless but BBC Parliament (504) is fine. Sky Sports is similarly bad.

 

:evil:

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Some channels have a weaker signal than others.

 

E4/more4 are good examples of channels that if your having trouble, your see issues with.

 

Could be dish alighnment out alittle.

 

Loose connector either dish side or your receiver side. (Are they covered in nice self-algamating tape to keep them dry ?)

 

Could be wires melting next to your radiator because its too hot :-)

 

Could be water in the cabling if its cracked due to age, or entry point into building or around a corner where its bent too much, or if its swinging lose, or its just aged too much in the sun, or your dogs been chewing on it..

 

The other day I had a bird strike on my dish and it bent it out of shape!

 

Also, maybe the twist of your LNB is slightly out. (My LNB freely moves, so I had to glue it in position to stop moving when the birds sat on it.)

 

I've also seen dishes only attached by 2 bolts and swinging in the wind!

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Thanks, Nigel.

 

I had a look at the dish the other day and there is nothing loose there. We have HD reception on an HD telly and, when the picture isn't freezing, it is superb so I don't think there is anything out of alignment.

The wire comes in from the dish and the telly is just the other side of the wall. No radiators near it.

The picture is OK now and this is after my wife turned the Sky off at the mains, waited a few seconds and started it up again. Like lots of others, the picture is worse when the wind really blows outside but the wind wasn't too bad this afternoon.

Maybe I should get someone out to check when it next goes haywire.

Thanks again.

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Maybe the house has moved :-)

 

(For some reason is reminded of a building he once worked in that once they put 42,000 tons of books in it, started to sink..)

 

Choice of receiver can effect the signal quality even, if I plug in my old Pace receiver it reports about half the signal than my new Pace box on the same dish/LNB !

 

What do you get when you look at services, system setup, signal test ?

 

(A picture of that if you've a camera phone/digital camera/etc. would be invaluable, as descriptions of bar percentages/etc. isn't necessarly always accurate.)

 

Maybe a wind break near the dish to help shield it would be handy, as I'm always pretty careful to place mine in a sheltered area for that reason.

 

The dish could always have been slightly out of alignment, also maybe a bolt has rusted here or there and changed it slightly.

 

How long a cable run do you have from receiver to dish ? (Shorter, better quality, or even thicker cable can improve things a little there if you really want to tweak things, and/or a replacement LNB (Though that might make things worse if its not a good one!))

 

It might also be interferance if your near something like a radar site, mobile phone mast, which might be solved by moving the dish so its shielded by a building.

 

I've spent years twiddling with my setup to get it to work smoothly :-)

 

At one point, I even had a dish inside screwed to the side of my TV and it worked fine through the window! (TV being an old Philips 26" model with wooden casing, hard to screw things to todays plastic jobbies..)

 

Now I've a 90cm dish thats served me well for years, but it was a pain to find that sweet spot outside to avoid the tree as much as possible to get enough of a signal so I'm not annoyed by picture breakup, also keep the cable ridiclously short, good quality, low noise LNB/etc.

 

Before then it was on the back garden wall, and the wall was slowly falling over, so had to build a huge almost Roman seige machine style support structure to hold the wall up using old floor joists.

 

Which, when the builders came to dig foundations next to it, I gently pointed out that removing all that wood would mean the wall would fall down..

 

When the wall did collaspe when they was working, luckily no one was injuried in the scramble to safety, but it was a close call!

 

 

Ah yes, the old, turn it off and on again solution, I've wired up a little switch so I can do that more easily with my box, though its been much better behaved since I put a new hard disk in it.

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Thanks again, Nigel.

 

My wife, who is more knowledgeable on these things, has done the "services, system setup, signal test" in the past and said it was OK.

 

I am looking at it now on the screen and would say it is reading the following:

 

Input 1

signal strength - about 70%

Signal quality - about 60%

Lock indicator - OK

 

Input 2

Signal strength - about 60%

Signal quality - about 50%

Lock indicator - OK

 

 

Are they OK?

 

Thanks again.

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Guest Anonymous

Assuming it is a Pace Sky+ box, I'd say the signal quality reading is a bit low. Over 70% would be more realistic. Having said that not all boxes give the same readings.

Weather can have a big effect on the signal strength and quality, especially on some channels which are transmitted on a very narrow beam, such as BBC and ITV.

Sad thing with digital signals is that the picture can be perfect one minute then gon the next just because the signal drops by a few percent. Analogue remained watchable with much more signal degradation,, but that's progress. :cry:

 

One little funny story about Sky signals going missing, was a person in Yell who had trouble with picture break up at about the same time every day. Eventually after several visits when I could manage, and finding nothing wrong, I managed to attend at the problem time. This was just after lunch, and as I sat watching the picture it started to break up. It only took a few minutes to find the fault:

After lunch each day the customer put bread scraps out for the birds, just below her dish.. Well you can't blame the birds for thinking that the LNB support arm was a good perch, and how were they to know that their little bodies would block the signal. :lol:

The customer moved their bird feeding location to the other side of the house and had no further problem. :D

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Hopefully others will answer to, but for my 2 cents, the signal quality seems to hint towards the low side. With mine, if its less than around 50% then I get issues with frozen screen, some channels not working/etc.

 

Its worth noting if its different when its playing up, and/or its windy/raining.

 

What size dish do you have ? (A bigger one might be needed..)

 

I'd say offhand its a fair bet that if you had someone around to look at it that knew what they was doing, they could make it better.

 

Also, is the dish clean and not covered in mould ?

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