All posts by Les Nicol
Below are all of Les Nicol's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
Christine - SKY receivers that are faulty will be repaired or replaced by SKY during the 12month intitial subscription period. Not all receivers (They are Manufactured by different suppliers.)- although they look alike are prone to PSU failure. I am aware of subscribers having receiver swop overs outside the initial contract period without a call out charge, but this seems discretionary usually when subscription termination is being muted by the subscriber.
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P>S SKY also offer (It costs though) a scheme that covers equipment replacement receiver-LNB-cabling and I have known some that have benefitted from this.
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Steve - I like you also have Technomate 6800 HD receiver(external 2.5 HDD) which I have paired with a motorised dish. Great performer. I also have a Humax DTR Freesat recorder and a couple of Technisat "Freesat" single tuner boxes with a PVR capability (external 2.5 HDD's) in other rooms in the house. I have to say fair use is made of the recording facility on these receivers and I haven't had any issues. Like Brian states. I think there must be a problem with the Sagems that you have. I've actually upgraded the Humax DTR to a 1TB HDD and and this was a painless transistion as well. (although 1YB is the maximum capacity the Humax will cope with in such a drive conversion). The downside with the Technomate if one can call it that is the absence of the fully featured EPG that comes with the "Freesat" receivers. I have put in a number of "Freesat" Humax DTR's for others and haven't had any issues other than some mis-recordings which seemed related to issues with ITV transmissions (Football coverage) rather than issues with the recivers themselves.
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John Roberts - I know that you've put this to Brian and he will likely offer his view on this as well - There will be two spare outs on the LNB on the dish arm. I reckon your best option (Much more positive than the other options you set out)is to have a feed taken from here to the TV in the kids room, as you say you don't want multiroom from SKY. There is an advatage in this in that if at a later point you upgrade the old TV for an LCD you could then consider a "Freesat" Satellite receiver as an option should the older SKY box fail. Meantime you can obtain a FSFS card from SKY
for £25.00 for this receiver. I am assuming that the TV in the kids room has a scart input that will allow you to connect the SKY receiver to it.
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ET - No you won't be able to to record and pause as SKY will disable this facility. You could get your own "Freesat" receiver which will allow you to do this. If your on a budget there's one of the "Freesat" receivers the Technisat HDFS which will allow you to Pause and record while watching another but can only be set to schedule one recording at a time, but can series record as oppposed to others more expensive that can be set to record two while watching another. The differnce in price is around £100. The technisat can stream to and from your PC and access iplayer. I personally have both types of receiver at home and both are excellant performers. You can expect to pay just under £150 for a Technisat with single tuner and around just under £250 for a "Freesat" DTR with twin twin tuners ( there are several to choose from) Really depends on how much recording your doing.
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P.S> The Tecnisat requires either a high capacity pendrive or external laptop 2.5 HDD drive where as the twin tuners have an onboard 320 or 500GB Hard Drive.
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Mark - Yes - Great little box. These guys selling on that well known site must be bulk buying from trade wholesalers in the hope of a quick turnover. This receiver packs a lot in and is fully featured Technomate put a lot into their receivers and are well quoted in "WotSat" reviews. I've supplied a number of the 5200 series and a 5402 very recently as a motorised installation. Very happy customer with this one and his "footie" sourced elsewhere!!
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Mark - I'm running the 6800HD motorised 36volt and Technomate VBox with a 1.5 Gibertini Dish and Inverto Black quad LNB - I had noticed the the issue with the EPG and like you say Hellasat does run the full 7day epg. Iam assuming your SKY card is an FSFS one?
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Mark - As far as I can see most of the FTA beamed at Europe are 7day EPG featured.( I checked across most last night) It would certainly be an asset if this could be mahaged more fully.
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Saturday 15 January 2011 11:02PM
David Ramsay - Yes, your second paragraph highlights what I think would be the prefered optiono for most. There is some ongoing co-operation between the BBC and HHK japan on this, but on the demo clip on highlighting early testing featured on the BBC's "Click" program slot on News24, it seems they are talking some 15 to 20 years down the line which will almosrt certainly see me in another place or being totally "Ga Ga"!!!