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Sky TV on board


Dartagnan

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I currently have a sky+ subscription at my home address.  Now that we have the Narrowboat we would like to spend some considerable time on board hopefully doing some extended cruising.  The question is how best to go about having sky on board.

i know I can use Sky Go via the iPads but that uses data.

Sky Go extra requires an Xbox or such connected to the sky box and then the sky box uses data.

i suppose my real question is if I instal a dish on the boat could I simply take the sky box from home and use that subscription or does sky prevent you from doing so via some technical trickery?

If I am able to get sky using my subscription what is the best dish system to use on board?  I realise cost has a bearing on the matter but could we ignore that for the purpose of this question as I can evaluate that at a later date.

If there are other methods of getting it I am all ears.

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We have sky on board which is registered to our home. It is as simple as unplugging the sky box and bringing it with you. We have a simple sat dish with magnetic base on the roof and it is very easy to line up with the satellite, using the inbuilt system setup on the sky box. As to cost our dish plus base and cables from Travelsat was about 100 pounds. You can go more expensive with auto self seeking dishes and the cost increases but the basic set has done us well for the past four years. Just one final point, your local news programmes will be from your local home area and not where your boat is located. I think you can reprogram but we don't bother.

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If you want Sky Sports or other subscriptions, follow Phil’s advice. It certainly worked for us. Be aware if you’re moored somewhere with no signal, the Sky set up doesn’t allow you to watch your recordings either.

We no longer have Sky at home or onboard. We watch Freeview at home and Freesat onboard. We bought a 1TB Humax Freesat receiver that works just like a Sky HD box, but obviously won’t connect to the Sky channels. It works great and over the last 3 years, has saved us a fortune.

 

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We have Sky Q at home. Unfortunately this uses a differnt LNB than the normal SKy+ so travelsat and the dish suppliers (forgotten who) dont do the sky Q LNB - not sure why. We are on the boat a lot more than at home so now thinking of canceling Sky Q and getting Sky+ back instead. Anyone know about the different LNB specs so I could try and get one for the boat for sky Q?

We also have BT TV at home and I just unplug the box at home and take it to the boat - and retune. It doesnt get the paid for channels though as that only works on the broadband network you are registered to. Nothing is simple.:banghead:

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1 hour ago, Dartagnan said:

I currently have a sky+ subscription at my home address.  Now that we have the Narrowboat we would like to spend some considerable time on board hopefully doing some extended cruising.  The question is how best to go about having sky on board.

i know I can use Sky Go via the iPads but that uses data.

Sky Go extra requires an Xbox or such connected to the sky box and then the sky box uses data.

i suppose my real question is if I instal a dish on the boat could I simply take the sky box from home and use that subscription or does sky prevent you from doing so via some technical trickery?

If I am able to get sky using my subscription what is the best dish system to use on board?  I realise cost has a bearing on the matter but could we ignore that for the purpose of this question as I can evaluate that at a later date.

If there are other methods of getting it I am all ears.

I use Skygo on the ipad tethered to my mobile. I've got a phone contract which gives me 40G of data each month, and that's plenty for me.  I generally get a good signal where ever I am. (Except the Shroppie)

I like keeping things simple, dishes and boxes and wires do me head in. And everything has to be compatible with this that and the other. Confuses me. 

This isn't the answer you were after but it might be worth thinking about if you can get the data.  

I have found bbc i player uses much much less data. It's a mere fraction compared to skygo, can anyone explain why?

Edited by Goliath
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34 minutes ago, Dr Bob said:

We have Sky Q at home. Unfortunately this uses a differnt LNB than the normal SKy+ so travelsat and the dish suppliers (forgotten who) dont do the sky Q LNB - not sure why. We are on the boat a lot more than at home so now thinking of canceling Sky Q and getting Sky+ back instead. Anyone know about the different LNB specs so I could try and get one for the boat for sky Q?

We also have BT TV at home and I just unplug the box at home and take it to the boat - and retune. It doesnt get the paid for channels though as that only works on the broadband network you are registered to. Nothing is simple.:banghead:

I'm not a Sky fan (mainly because we don't 'need' the extra channels), so have  Freesat boxes instead. From what I know and have gathered from a quick Google, is that the Sky Q box uses a "quad LNB". This is a very standard industry device (I've been using them for years) and not magic! Where travelsat and other devices may fail is that having four cables flapping about aren't very compatible with self steering dishes. Sooo - don't ditch your Q just because of the LNB. I have dishes at home  and on the boat and they work with 1,2 and 4 (probably 8 as well) port LNBs.

What I have found is that fiddling about with a sat dish and a sticky-out-arm is inconvenient and last year I found a flat dish at a reasonable price from Amazon's "slightly-damaged-packaging" offers. It's called a Selfsat  and is available in 1,2 or 4 port variations. It's a dream,  has a wide acceptance angle, so easier to line up with the satellite group. Bide your time and you can get one at a reasonable cost.

(Note - the way that satellite reception works is that you need a port to watch a channel, if you record and watch then you need two and it you're like My Management she'll want to recod one or two programmes at the same time... No problem for Freeview but a pain for satellite.

I've just spent a while hacking around  - and whereas the ads: suggest a standard LNB will do the job, there's an outside possibility that Q may use what I would call a distribution LNB (the electronics inside the amplifier means that there's no limit to how many channels cane be watched at once). I think that's unlikely - but I may be wrong - which I don't like...

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30 minutes ago, OldGoat said:

I'm not a Sky fan (mainly because we don't 'need' the extra channels), so have  Freesat boxes instead. From what I know and have gathered from a quick Google, is that the Sky Q box uses a "quad LNB". This is a very standard industry device (I've been using them for years) and not magic! Where travelsat and other devices may fail is that having four cables flapping about aren't very compatible with self steering dishes. Sooo - don't ditch your Q just because of the LNB.

 

 

Thanks  Old Goat, but its not a quad LNB. I think it is a wide band LNB so uses as wider frequency band than the normal on - or something to do with band width. We had  a quad LNB with sky + to feed two different boxes.

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13 hours ago, Dr Bob said:

Thanks  Old Goat, but its not a quad LNB. I think it is a wide band LNB so uses as wider frequency band than the normal on - or something to do with band width. We had  a quad LNB with sky + to feed two different boxes.

I thought I might be on shaky ground! I did a Google and came up with a listing implying they were standard LNBs and I thought "Oh, Yeah?". The distribution type are fixed to high / low band and vertical / horizontal orientation and the Q device decides which of the four variables is needed for any channel that a device needs at a time. It means that the number of devices connected is 'unlimited' It's academic anyway in your case.

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When we moved to live on board we brought our Sky+ box from home and it worked fine. We bought a dish with a magnetic base from Travelsat. Be very careful with this because a few months later the roof paint began to lift and blister. Even though the magnetic base had a rubber boot, the regular lifting and re-positioning of the dish in order to get a signal in various mooring locations had been progressively weakening the paint.

We've abandoned our Sky system now and gone for a Freeview PVR receiver/recorder with a normal TV aerial. We used to have so much hassle trying to get a signal with the dish because unlike with a freeview aerial the signal has to be more specific. Also, with our new set up, if we can't get a signal we are still able to watch stuff we have recorded whereas with Sky you can't.

But then there are a lot of you who prefer a satellite system so it obviously has its merits. It's all down to personal preference, a bit like the Cassette toilets versus pump out argument :) 

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24 minutes ago, Grassman said:

We've abandoned our Sky system now and gone for a Freeview PVR receiver/recorder with a normal TV aerial. We used to have so much hassle trying to get a signal with the dish because unlike with a freeview aerial the signal has to be more specific. Also, with our new set up, if we can't get a signal we are still able to watch stuff we have recorded whereas with Sky you can't.

It is interesting you cant watch recorded stuff without a signal. I knew that from the system at home but forgotten it. I'd love to be able to get sky on the boat but there are a lot of trees about and its not always easy to get a sky signal with those trees. Maybe I'll just stick to the BT youview box (just acting as a PVR reciever/recorder) and then get BT sport and the Sky stuff via sky go. We currently have data contracts of 80Gig per month which is almost used up each month at the moment (watching the TV more in the winter). It would be nice to reduce the data to SD quality both on skygo and the BT box (accessing I player etc) but cant see how its done. We've been avoiding getting netflix but it looks like you can download from that in SD so less data so we will take out the cheap contract with them.

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9 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

Thanks Brian. That's what I remember hearing when they installed our sky q. Interestingly, when I checked with Travelsat and Maxview (the VuCube) in October, both told me their systems were not compaitible with the new Sky Q LNB - and at the time I couldnt find any Q LNBs for sale. I have just looked now and amazon have got them for £14. They dont look much different to the sky+ LNBs. I wonder if the 'not compatible' was due to the LNBs not being available. I will get back to Travelsat and maxview.

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Thank you all so much for the replies.  I think we will stick with the iPads for Sky Atlantic and Sky Sports making use of the data allowances and use freeview for regular viewing.

@Eclipse No2 don’t worry I wasn’t going to physically attach a dish to the roof it was just for occasional viewing using a portable dish lol

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6 minutes ago, Halsey said:

I was only asking myself this Q yesterday -if you have a 12v SMART TV can you use SKY GO without a dish presumably data hungry??? 

I use Sky GO  on my apple mac and plug an hdmi lead into the tv. I find it uses 1.5 to 2.0Gig/hr download so not good if you are watching a couple of rugby matches. Be good if you could set it to download lower quality ie SD not HD content. I cant see anything that lets you go to lower quality but someone with a few more brain cells could work it out.

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  • 2 months later...
On 21/01/2018 at 19:41, Goliath said:

I have found bbc i player uses much much less data. It's a mere fraction compared to skygo, can anyone explain why?

Because it will throttle down to a shitty picture if that’s all you require. SkyGo only ever supplies an HD feed. 

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