Cable Splitting with Sky Plus

[Steve8217]

I have sky plus and have the usual 2 cables going into the box feed 1 and feed 2. I attempted to split the signal with a splitter box so it sky could be viewed in 2 more different rooms. We have spare boxes sitting around doing nothingso it seemed to make sense, I connected feed 2 to the input on the splitter and ran a line to the first box perfect picture and a small amount of signal loss which is expected. But then I connected up the other box but all I keep getting is "NO SIGNAL" could this be due to the signal not being strong enough to be split between three boxes or another issue. If I can't work it its a heafty call out charge from sky which I would love to avoid if at all possible they get enough money from me as it is !

 

[marshahu]

You cannot simply split a Sky signal internally - you need to purchase an LNB on your dish with enough inputs - in your case a quad LNB. Outputs 1 and 2 go into the Sky plus box as usual and the 3rd and 4th to the spare boxes. Sky Plus/HD boxes have two tuners, hence why they require two inputs so you can record one and watch another channel ;-)

The reason you get no signal is because that input from the LNB which you attempted to split can only focus on one channel at a time. If you split a single LNB input and then plug them into two boxes on different channels, one will never get a signal as it will be forcing the single input to focus on multiple sources from the dish.

Similar principle to motorised dishes - you can't split the single output on a motorised dish, have one on a channel pointing to Astra 2 (the standard Sky Digital satellite) and another on a channel pointing to Hotbird (a foreign channel satellite) - how does the motorised dish know which satellite to point to, especially as far as the dish is concerned, it only has one input, thus should only be fed instruction ;-)

If you are in UK, a quad LNB can be purchased from Maplin for under £45 - check out www.maplin.co.uk - product code A15FB.

Make sure you are very careful upon installation of the LNB - knock the dish 1mm out of its position and you will lose signal completely and it can be expensive getting Sky out to realign the dish (unless you time is as such that you can blame a thunderstorm for the misalignment )