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Evening All....Have a Sky+HD Thomson box and since yesterday have had really bad picture break up and distorted sound on BBC1 and SkyOne. All signals appear strong and nothing else has changed....Have undergone a forced update but this has not cleared it. Any other ideas would be welcome, thanks
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If it's an old Thomson box it's far more likely to be a failing power supply.
Watching HD channels the picture if fine, its the SD channels that break up.
I swapped input 2 to another lnb connection and it appeared to improve signal strength, for about 10 minutes and then it went back to being lower than input 1
Its out of warranty and will be out of the windows to soon
The PSU (power supply unit) is the heart of the HD box, everything it does comes from the PSU. If this is not delivering clean, stable and correct power, performance will, at the very best suffer. To cut costs (at least partially because they were beaten up on price by Sky in 2006) Thomson used poor quality capacitors in the power supplies. Even when new, these delivered pretty dirty power which often lead to that typical Thomson quirkiness we all had to get used to. Given a few years service (often a time figure measured in months as opposed to years) these capacitors give out and the box comes to a grinding halt. To take my heart analogy further, think of your PSU as a heart that has a badly blocked artery and also is also giving low blood pressure, the patient has not died yet, but death is coming soon without help.
If you want to fix it, Satcure sell a bag of bits for about £15 delivered (if you or a friend can solder). Failing that, Digifix or Satcure sell exchange boards for around £35.00 that replace your dying one. You send in your old board, they send you a rebuilt one by return of post (obviously, this option means no HD for a few days). The Satcure or Digifix PSU repair options are far and away the best, they use far far higher quality capacitors and the PSU is extremely unlikely to ever fail again. Beware of cheaper imitation repairs on ebay, they are not all what they seem!
As I said, self repair is easy (there is a guide here if you want to see what is involved). Literally 1000s of us have been there before you, a good many of us post on here so there is plenty of help available. If the prospect of performing surgery on your HD box is not for you, there is a list of local repairers on the Satcure site here, some of these will do the repair for you while you wait by prior appointment.
I hope this helps, good luck. Post back here if you have more questions.
Thanks for the advice guys, much appreciated.
Just click on the links Masteriser has posted, that will take you where you need to be. (post 6)
Alan
The PSU should produce clean stable DC. When the capacitors start to fail, instead of producing clean DC, it produced DC with high frequency ac ripple on it. This upsets some of the workings of the box, and no signal on some channels is just one of the more common symptoms. Once it starts it will vary with time which channels are affected.
If you can't fix the PSU yourself, look on this list to see if there's a repairer near you http://www.satcure.com/psu_fix.htm If so many of them will, by appointment fix your box while you wait.
If you can't find one close enough, many will fix your PSU by mail order.
You did read and digest ALL post #6 ?
No signal being recieved, not picking up sky news at all, dish has not been moved, went ut to day no movement
Sky HD box is 14 months old, and since I am moving to cable, no point in getting box repaired
maybe all the thomsons boxes will start to show problem in the next few months , like getting message...no signal being recieved
Alot of them already have, if you do a search you will find many threads on the subject.
Alan
No problem, please let us know how you get on.
Exactly, this started to become a common problem about 2 years after Sky introduced HD (around summer 2008) and there has been a very steady stream of often lengthy threads since.
Thomsons were the only box until after then and by the looks of it the majority started to suffer issues (ofen in that 2 - 3 year period of age).
Another problem was that Sky seem to have refused to admit that the Thomson PSU was dodgy - presumably fearing mass demands for a recall programme (ironically they did recall loads of Pace boxes at great cost in 2009 for a non active fault that hardly anyone ever seemed to get!)
Because of their lack of admission it seems that Thomson boxes returned to Sky often never got the PSU replaced so they will eventually fail - possibly even sooner than 2 years after being given customers via the refurbished box route.
Points worth noting are that Thomsons were a decent box but for this confidence destroying issue that is at least partly Sky's fault for not accepting and correcting as they did with Pace.
Thomson no longer make Sky HD boxes (and have not for 2 years now - so any box you see advertised or receive is at least that old).
However, the later box types (Pace, Samsung and Amstrad) have no such PSU problems as yet (different make it seems - indeed the very later Thomsons had a better one also).
So never accept a Thomson from Sky as a refurbish/replacement (if they even have any left now).
If you have one that is failing then fix it if you can or persuade Sky to replace it for free on pain of cancellation as it is really their fault for running away from what is a patently obvious PSU issue that years of posts on here prove categorically.