Devblog

I’ve got Sky+ and recently it’s been playing up – loosing the picture, freezing while watching something and worst, not letting me select certain channels – it just says “No signal is being received” on some channels. I was pretty certain it was neither of the two usual reasons that Sky give:

• There are no trees around my box – especially none that have grown by two feet overnight
• It’s not the weather – it’s just stopped raining and, unlike the TV picture, the sky is clear.

I did a bit of digging around but since it’s night, dark and I don’t have a ladder, I decided to start with the things I could try from my chair. I delved into the Services menu and under System Setup (4) and Signal Test (6) and there’s details on the two inputs (Sky+ has two cables coming from the dish). Input 2 was fine – fairly good signal strength and quality and was Locked, but Input 1 had no signal and was Not Locked.

I tried messing with the cable and figured that the young one had maybe kicked it and disconnecting and reconnecting it usually made it come back for a while. Since I couldn’t keep doing this all night I did some more digging and I found a suggestion that said it could be the LNB overheating and needs powering off and on again (the LNB is the Low-Noise Block – part of the dish). Since we’ve just moved into the start of summer it makes sensse so here’s how you do it:

• Go into the Services menu
• Enter the Installer Menu – press 401 then select
• Enter LNB Setup
• Go down to LNB Power Supply and turn it off then save it.
• Wait a few minutes and then turn it on again
• Both the Inputs should be Locked

This seems to be working for me. It was loosing the Input 1 signal every few minutes and it has been running fine for the last few hours now. I’ll see how it is over the new week and post again if it doesn’t work.