Talk Quesada forum

Hi, any ideas why I lose Pick tv channel 151 on a sky box at 6pm some nights, but reappears after about 20 - 60 minutes
then ok all night..( ps Star trek fan)

Take your pick of any one or combination of:
Dish size,
dish alignment,
LNB failure,
insects / debris inside the LNB (if a 1.8 or 2.4m dish),
cable connection issues,
cracked cable letting in water,
receiver failure....

Thanks - but only on one channel as all others are perfect signal and strength
and ch151 only goes off at 6pm then on again later, or could it be external interferance ?

Are you sure it is only one channel?
It would be virtually impossible for just one channel to fail on its own at one specific time.
What about Sky News and Sky Arts which are on the same frequency?
If those go off then it is a "frequency" issue, affected by one of the things I have mentioned.
If it is just Pick TV that goes off only, then that is something very specific to you and you alone.

And note that the signal meter bars on a sky box may not be showing the levels for the specific frequency that is being affected. In many cases it simply shows the levels for the Sky guide data frequency...not frequencies for a specific channel, unless you are recording it, or it is being shown in the preview window...

Yes only one channel effected, sky news never goes off even in heavy rain.
just have to live with it I think.......

Pick is one of the weaker signal therefore more prone to loss than many other channels but I agree just one channel playing up makes no sense from a technical standpoint.

Interference can have an effect but it's unlikely to be the problem here.

Sky New is one, if not the strongest and I believe is the channel used for box updates so needs to be reliable. It's not just about frequency!

Porential fixes are per the list already given.

It might be possible to fractionally tweak either the dish alignment and/or LNB skew to optimise Pick but it would come at a cost to something else.

Thanks for your knowledge and input Guys (Darro - Satandpcguy) will just put up with it.

Darro wrote:Pick is one of the weaker signal therefore more prone to loss than many other channels
...
Sky New is one, if not the strongest and I believe is the channel used for box updates so needs to be reliable. It's not just about frequency!

Slight problem with this is that Pick UK SD and Sky News UK SD are on the SAME frequency, so Pick cannot be weaker than Sky News!
Which makes the problem of just one channel dropping out at a regular time weird.

Sky box updates come from 11778 (a different frequency than used by Sky News), the frequency used for all Sky box data, from box updates to full EPG data.

We may be getting somewhere here --- So does that also mean that the data update ie EPG that is downloaded to my box seems to be very late, as I only get the EPG just hours before and not the full day from the morning time, ( if that makes sense, so seeing the epg whats on, only a few hours in advance )

Jabberwocky wrote:We may be getting somewhere here --- So does that also mean that the data update ie EPG that is downloaded to my box seems to be very late, as I only get the EPG just hours before and not the full day from the morning time, ( if that makes sense, so seeing the epg whats on, only a few hours in advance )

Guessing you have a Sky+HD box, using one cable...?
And when you go to the guide you have the "mini screen" top right?

If so, then as the box is using only one cable feed, that is being used for the tv channel being shown in the mini tv... and so the EPG will not populate fully, as the full EPG data is only on one frequency... and all the others carry 6 to 12 hours data only.

So make sure your box is in single feed mode (service 001 select), and that your mini TV option is turned off also. Then when you go to the sky guide, the single cable is only being used to populate the EPG, and not jfeed the mini tv...

But all of that would not make a difference as to why one channel and one channel only goes off at the same time every day!