Sky dish signal - anyone have problems in bad weather?

[Housemum]

Wasn't sure if this was housekeeping or property but posting here anyway! When the weather is drizzly and miserable (like today) our Sky signal goes haywire - the pictures/sound go out of sync, it pauses randomly, sometimes comes up with the blue screen for a few seconds. Does anyone else have this problem? Last time I spoke to Sky I got a non-committal, "yeah that can happen sometimes". Are there any TV repairers on here who know more?

Thanks!

I'm not a tv repairer, but yes - that does happen to us in really bad weather.

We did have problems because the cable outside to the dish had lots of joins in it - they eventually replaced it with one huge long cable and that improved things.

We don't have Sky (am overseas) but had same problem with our local provider.

When the dish is set up they check the % strength of signal....here it should be about 80%...(it depends on your area)....

..anyway...over time the dish got blown about and our % strength had reduced down to about 30% so every time weather was bad we lost signal.

We had to get the dish person back, he shifted it slightly (took all of 2 mins!), % strength back up in the 80's and now it works fine in most weather.

Oooops, forgot to say, on your Sky remote there should be somewhere where you can check the strength of your signal. Probably called set up or something admin-y like that. The Sky people should be able to tell you how to check.

Our Sky only messes up when there's a thunderstorm or heavy snow.
Try turning it on and off on the wall and check the connections on the back of your box. It's the first thing they will ask you to do if you phone them.

Ours was like that and we paid the maintenance charge to get them out to fix. With us the problem was that in bad weather trees nearby moved blocking the signal to the dish. They moved the dish a few metres and put it a bit higher and it's fine now.

Some good ideas here - we might be getting a new aerial socket in the conservatory when it's built later this year - will get them to check the cable. Whenever I look at signal strength it seems fine, usually around 80, but like haggis we have trees nearby so that could be it - unfortunately short of a 10 feet pole on the house I don't think we can do much about positioning as the trees behind our house are up an embankment so some are as tall as the roofline.

We get this too, about 3 years ago it was becoming impossible so we got a local TV aerial man in and he found the dish had come loose. This made a big difference. We definitely have more problems in winter, also in spring when the tall trees outside are coming into leaf we usually get a bad patch

There are several levels of reset you can do (I have googled this extensively in the past!), one of which forces a download of all the latest software patches to your box, this is definitely worth doing. If I can find where I wrote it down I will post it later.

Power off for 30 seconds or so, then power on holding down the back up button til message on screen saying "Software download" or similar. It will then take 5-10 mins. It should not wipe your recordings if it is Sky+.