Hiya everyone,

I'm looking for some advice for my dad and his new Freesat + box. Any help will be appreciated. Here's the story....

My dad took the hump with Sky and cancelled his subscription about 2 years ago. He still has his normal sky box fitted and watches the free to air channels regularly. Anyway, I had mentioned the benefits of Sky+ and urged him to invest. He was reluctant to go back to sky so went to the local tv shop and bought himself a Freesat+ box. The shop offered installation at £80 but my dad, being a pensioner, declined thinking he'd get me to fit it for nowt. This is all well and good but I have my suspicions that this won't be as easy as replacing one box with the other.

Is it possible to just remove the normal sky box and fit the freesat+ box? He has a dish input socket on the old sky box but 3 LNB sockets on the new freesat box. What would I have to do to get his system up and running? I assume he can use the original sky dish as I don't fancy climbing up onto the roof to change anything. I believe the new box to be a Humax plus box.

Yes it is possible to just swap the new Humax box with the old Sky one but to get the full benefit from the Humax and use it's twin tuners a second cable from the LNB (on the existing mini-dish) would be required.

So if I just swap the boxes would my dad be able to record, pause live tv etc or do those functions require the second cable?

The second cable would allow you to record 2 channels at the same time, you would be able to record 1 channel and pause live tv with just the one cable connected.

Thanks for the information.

Not true, connecting the tuner 1 out to tuner 2 in as described in the manual allows two channel recording (the 2nd channel recording choice is more limited than using two cables) and also 3rd channel viewing. In the special case where both recordings are being made from the same transponder time shifting is available on all 3rd viewable channels (In effect recording 3 on a single connection)