Category: Satelite TV


Sky Plus

Decided to upgrade my SKY in the dining room to SKY+, I had a old box which was not too reliable, but once it booted up it was OK, (some funny microcontroller fault, not any of the usual well documented faults)

First stumbling block, the wife, insists on nice face plates for all the cables, so I need to buy a double plate to replace the current single one, so off to maplins we go. Double Face plate and a few meters of decent coax, the dish is only just the other side of the wall, so nice and simple.

Managed to pick the windiest day on 2008 so far, but got the New bit of coax from the QUAD LNB to the dining installed without dropping the ladder into the conservatory window.

Now for the inside stuff, connect all the leads and switch on, WHOO HOOO, good signal on both inputs, call sky to get the card re-paired to the NEW receiver

To damn quick, 30 mins later the box locked up and refused to BOOT

BOLLOCKs, Hello Ebay ?????????..

SKy+ migration

For a few years i have had an Early , V1, Pace 3000 sky plus box with a big disk MOD.Over the past few months this has become increasingly unreliable, locking up, not coming back after a cold starts etc etc.

Enter Ebay, 40 quid for a used pace 3100 box.
Now the fun starts, I then discover that different veriosn of SKY plus use different file systems, BUGGER

Enter Sky Copy plus?? the lastest beta (1.2.0.1), will for format conversions 🙂

Quick Download, connect to my laptop with a maplin PATA USB2 adaptor, ??convert and bob’s your aunties live in lover

Well, its me again, sat in my hotel room in Seattle

due ti the fact i have NO Sci-Fi channel on the TV in my room, I thought i woudl re visit Sky Anytime, formerly known as Sky by Broadband

I??dont really like it because it is a peer to peer system and therefore a bandwidth hogger (waster if you hav to pay for it)
but he i am deperate for some decent TV, non o fthe jerry springer format stuff, which is all yoiu sem to get on network TV in Seattle

Attempt 1, Based on you IP address you are not in the UK, SOD OFF
Attempt 2, VPN to home, sorted donload starts, but how slow, competrting for bandwitdh on the 256Kb/s side of the ADSL
Attempt 3, VPN to a mates office, he has 1.5 Meg SDSL??

SORTED, still slow, but at least i get to download and watch some decent TV

thought i would have another tinker

this time I noticed there Peer to Peer software is NOT nat aware

lots of conection attempts to private IP address’s

Caravaning and Satelite TV

Had a fantastic time away over easter in the caravan, weather was OK, Did absolutly nothing, which was the whole point
only issue was the pitch, right next to some 30-40 foot trees, and guess which way the satelite dish needed to point

🙁

Easter Weekend camping with sat dish

I have recently been called to a friends house to look at an issue with their broadband connection being very unreliable, dropping out etc.

Having been on site for an hour broadband seem to work fine, line stats were good etc etc,
and then the phone rang…. and the ADSL dropped
Hmmmmm. Faulty filter? I thought, Pull out a few cupboards to get to the phone socket
?

AARRGGHH !!!?

All of the Phones etc where plugged directly into the wall socket, the only thing connected to the filter was the USB modem !!!

Apparently they had SKY+ and SKY multiroom installed, and the so called “Engineer” had added some extra sockets etc and reconnected everything in the wrong order and in the process completely screwed the ADSL connection !

?