I guess this is sort of computer related, can’t find any other thread where it would fit.

The last couple of days we are getting repeated disruptions to our reception due to ‘atmospheric conditions’, pixelation through to complete loss of picture for periods. So bad viewing is almost impossible.

We are north of Invercargill.

We have had trees on our boundary cause occasional issues in the last but these were trimmed a few weeks ago and we have had no problems since then even in the wind, so I discount that now as a cause.

There is rain around the region of course so I guess that must be the issue, but really can a bit of rain disrupt signal/reception so much? Surely in this day and age technology is better and more reliable than that?

Our dish is old, was on the house when we purchased 20 years ago, does that make a difference, has dish technology improved through that time? (to a layman it doesn’t appear to have changed).

Edited by gina090 at 7:07 am, Thu 3 Dec

gina090 - 2020-12-03 07:06:00

We've had this off and on for several years. Got so bad we got the sky tech out one time and he replaced the LNB, (part on the dish), and the sky 'box' as well. It still happens at times tho it seems to have reduced of recent - we're not sure why. What we do when we get pixilation when the sky is clear and theres not any real apparent reason for it is to turn the tv and sky box off at the wall, (there are two sky boxes - ones the decoder and I'm not sure what the other one does lol). All the tv and stuff plug into one plug so we turn the lot off for about a minute then restart it and that seems to fix it at least for a while.

nice_lady - 2020-12-03 07:11:00

You could just drop using the dish entirely and remove it.

Use a fibre connected box like Vodafone TV.

No rainfade issues

gblack - 2020-12-03 07:20:00

I am interested in the fibre box suggestion above, does Sky offer an option direct or is it a case of using an ISP like Vodafone as suggested. I am keen to follow this up for our situation but we don’t have fibre, just broadband at this point, although Chorus are promoting fibre around the area so may need to contact them and explore that (I have resisted this so far having seen some of the install disasters attributed to them).

lobster - 2020-12-03 08:48:00

The member deleted this message.

patxyz - 2020-12-03 12:24:00

Have the same issue

lk104 - 2020-12-03 12:30:00

Mould, dirt and water drops on the dish surface will affect reception.Give it a clean

androth2 - 2020-12-03 14:14:00

https://tv.vodafone.co.nz/

Buy the box yourself from warehouse , noel lemming etc and in less then 5 minutes set up

choose what channels you want and subscribe to them :)

docpc - 2020-12-03 14:38:00

Be sure there is nothing in the way of the 'signal' path to the dish, even a few tree branches can cause atmospheric conditions and disruptions. Checking the signal strength and adjusting to the maximum signal won't hurt either. The dish position may need tweaking.

muppet_slayer - 2020-12-03 14:47:00

lobster wrote:

I am interested in the fibre box suggestion above, does Sky offer an option direct or is it a case of using an ISP like Vodafone as suggested. I am keen to follow this up for our situation but we don’t have fibre, just broadband at this point, although Chorus are promoting fibre around the area so may need to contact them and explore that (I have resisted this so far having seen some of the install disasters attributed to them).

Sky boxes are still very old tech with MySky having an old HDD that can fail. Sky apparently worked on bringing out an internet connected box to replace the satellite boxes, but they canned the project to save money which seems very short sighted to me.

Talk to your ISP about fibre or look at options. It is far superior and we ended up getting 200Mbp download speed for similar cost to our old ADSL connection.

Not sure what the issue with installation is for you, but can't complain about ours. At the moment I would think vast majority of business and homes are fibre connected in NZ

I meant to add; the original version 1 Vodafone TV box was only available with Vodafone ISP, but this year I changed ISP and got a second generation box ( which is available in-store at a bunch of places) which works with your ISP.

Very easy to connect to SkyTV, but we found we had dozens of channels, all the on-demand content like TVNZ as well as Netflix, Neon and my daughter's Amazon Prime so ended up dropping our Sky subscription saving quite a lot per month. I will use Sky2Go to add in Sports when Rugby restarts next year

Edited by gblack at 7:20 am, Fri 4 Dec

gblack - 2020-12-04 07:14:00

I used my Sky dish for a few years after I got a Freeview box, then the Sky LNB stopped working. I found a nice company on Trademe selling LNBs for under $10, and that works fine.

trade4us2 - 2020-12-08 19:27:00

My electrician told me last week that moisture and in coastal areas salt causes the LNB's to degrade and they wear out eventually.

If you want to stick with it, I would suggest realign, change the LNB if that doesn't help and realign again. If you don't have a signal meter, then you can use the sky box's own diagnostic with someone yelling out the windows to you.

I think that Freeview satellite dishes are better than the old Sky ones, but this needs checking.

emmerson1 - 2020-12-10 08:55:00

You don't have to have the satellite dish on the roof. Put it somewhere where you can see the diagnostic page on the TV.

trade4us2 - 2020-12-10 17:10:00