Mark Rogers <mark@quarella.co.uk> wrote:
Sky apparently will install a dish for £50, but I'm inclined to DIY not least because there's an old dish on the side of the house anyway which would need replacing but may be a good starting point. It will depend on the type of dish I should be looking for, which I have no idea about. Are we talking Maplin parts or something more specialist?
I've missed the reason for replacing the dish, but pretty much any standard parts should work. I think the key words are offset dish and Ku band, but there's not as many places selling the other sorts (centre-focus and C band). All Maplins stuff should be fine but it's usually a little more expensive, a limited range and without in-shop advice/experience. I've DIY'd both my installations and so did my brother. Four bolts and hanging a dish isn't that complicated. It's the motor which I usually mess up! [...]
If I'm doing this myself the only real incentive would be to go for a quad LNB. Can I upgrade a standard Sky dish if I go that route?
Yes, but Sky dishes use oddly-shaped/fixed LNBs, so look at ranges like http://www.satcure.com/accs/page1.htm A Linux-based DVB-S receiver won't care whether it's circular or Sky-shaped, but reception is worse if you mismatch the LNB and dish and Sky dishes aren't that great to start with. Hope that helps, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ (Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237