HELP!! Is it possible to watch sky channels in differnt rooms of the house from the same sky dish???

Question

hiya. I need some help and advice on how i can solve the "fighting over the remote commotion" in my household. The thing is, we do have a sky dish, which we watch channels from in the living room, but say i wanted sky in my bedroom or in the other rooms of the house, do i need to get another sky dish??? or from that one dish i can get it? please help. P.s I live in the UK.

provide sources if possible. Thank you =D

Answer 1

When you get Sky installed (whether you have a subscription to Sky or not), you get a dish, a decoder box and a card that goes in the box.

The microwave beam from the satellite hits the dish and then gets reflected into the little arm that sticks up in the middle of the dish into a device called a "low-noise block downconverter"  (this is commonly called an LNB) the LNB converts the microwave signal into something that the decoder box can handle. You can only have one cable connected to one LNB, if you try to split the signal from the LNB into two cables it will end up being too weak and the picture will break up frequently. It's the LNB that does the channel switching not the box one LNB views one channel only. If you want to receive two channels at the same time you need to connect to two LNBs.

Most sky satellite dishes are fitted with at least two LNBs, some are fitted with four. So if your dish have two or more LNBs you can have a cable coming from each one into a separate decoder box, but in order to watch the subscription channels  you need a valid subscription card in each box (I think you still need a card (without paying for a subscription) for some of the free-to-view channels that are meant to be broadcast to the UK only (like the BBC channels which legally only a licence payer should be able to receive)).

If you have Sky+ then that needs two cables from two LNBs connected to the Sky+ box, one to supply the channel you're watching and one to supply the channel you want to record while watching the other one. So if you want Sky+ in two rooms you needs a dish with at least 4 LNBs.

Ring up Sky customer services they can explain everything, or you can get someone (a qualified installer) to sort it out for you, look in the yellow pages for Sky TV installation and ring them up.

The short answer is that you need to get another Box and get someone to install it, either from Sky themselves or from someone else.

If you don't want to give Sky any money, you can always buy a second-hand decoder box and card on eBay. Bear in mind though that once a card has been initialised for a set-top box it can only be used in that box and they will be fixed to whatever TV region you are in when you initialised it. So if you buy one from someone in Newcastle and you are in London the default BBC1 (channel 101) will be for the North-East rather than London. Your local version of BBC1 will still be available on another channel though.