Aye, yep, other knowledgable posters have advised this is probably the problem but where I am the signal I get is the best I can get due to trees and the unwillingness of any local installers (I've tried a few!!) or even Sky when I subscribed to them being willing to put the dish in a position where I know it will work.

Come October my main dish will burst back in to life and I'll get a good signal. This is why I've perservered and am waiting until then before thinking of returns.

What some people may not realise is Sky installers often only optimise the dish for the Astra satellites at 28.2. As the Freesat EPG and other data is coming from Eurobird at 28.5, people's dishes may be slightly out and may suffer errors in downloading data especially in poorer weather conditions- this was why a lot of Sky customers had a problem with the Setanta signal which was also on Eurobird.

Fully agree with this. I ditched Sky and find the Freesat system to be far more reliable than the Sky box.

I was reading through the posts that were a few weeks back about problems with unreliable mains supply. It wasn't something that I suffer, but I take the point that it could happen when we are away on holiday. I had an idea for a workaround......

Reports suggest that the internal clock goes back to 00:00 when the mains is restored. If it continues to count upwards won't the box eventually reach a time when it thought it should wake up, it will wake up and correct its time but almost certainly have missed the original recording but possibly be ready for subsequent recordings. Does this mean that the worst that you can miss is one programme per outage?

My idea for a workaround, assuming that the clock comes to life but set to zero, is to use the box's timer for setting a power on and power off time. (p41 of manual)
Couldn't you set the box to have a wake-up at 00:30 and a turn off at 00:32. That way the box would correct itself within half an hour of the power being restored.... hypothetically!

Sorry if this has been tried and failed or known workaround!


..... I lost the will to read all of the intervening posts as a few people "went off on one" and the signal got lost in the noise

It's been tested and does not work

You need a robot to push the front on button when the power comes back. Now where's that Meccano

Thank you. I would add that my SKY+ box locks up on average every couple of weeks. In fact I have had 4 Sky+ boxes and all have done the same. I still run it alongside Freesat which as I said has been fine.

I would add that for me, SD through the Humax is excellent. Other posters disagree.

Oh bugger!

I found it indistinguishable from the output of my Sky box.

No, because it resets to 00:00 and STAYS at 00:00. When I came home following a power cut, the box was displaying 00:00. I didn't walk in the second the power came back on!

I honestly found it worse than my old sky box - until I did some tweaking with the colours settings etc on the tv. Now I would say that most of the SD channels are really good and at least as good as Sky. However, what lets the image down sometimes is when you get poor bit rates from some channels eg Channel 4 in the middle of the night, sport transmissions are pretty poor.

Patrick