Bad Sky reception - what to do?

[GeorginaA]

We've got appallingly bad reception at the moment on NickJr - CBeebies is not too bad, but NickJr is virtually unwatchable - blocky and sound fading in and out. We've always seemed to have fairly bad reception - made much worse when it's raining heavily (in fact, it's standard practice for us to stick a DVD on the moment it rains heavily during "TV time"!) but just recently it seems to have got worse - it's quite sunny and nice now, but yet again, Nick Jr is unwatchable!

Is there going to be a way to fix this? The dish is a few years old - is there "better" dishes out now that can cope with bad reception better? Or is it worth calling out an engineer to check alignment? How much is that going to cost?

Ours goes funny when the weather is poor. Heavy rain sets it off usually.

just to let you know we have the same problem!!
I will be interested in your replies

Are there trees in the way? My parents got bad reception in bad weather because of the largish tree outside.

(that'll teach you to move out of Croydon and lose cable )

Is it every channel? I would be tempted to call out an engineer if the reception is always bad - perhaps the bad weather has knocked your dish and it's not fixed securely. Call Sky and find out if there is a problem in your area first and then ask them how much it will cost for them to come out.

We were told the digibox is more likely to give out before the dish. When we have had signal problems it tends to be BBC/itv that goes first. Sometimes a dish can be blown off line a few degrees and that can affect it. Have you checked the signal quality/strength under Set Up ? We recently had our dish put up and had to have it checked again when the signal quality was poor and we lost BBC and ITV - cost just under £60 I think.

Soupy: don't get me started on the poor service we had from Telewest in Croydon

Problem is, I know Sky are just going to say "you're in a weak reception area, tough" as they've said before when the BBC channels moved satellite (took us AGES to convince them it was more than that and they finally sent an engineer to realign the dish so we could receive the beeb channels again). As I say, the box and dish aren't new - I was wondering if the technology has improved to make it worth while changing them.

No trees directly in the way that I can tell - just lots and lots of houses

Is it better to go to a local aerial-type place rather than running the Sky Tech gauntlet, do you think? Or are we going to end up paying a small fortune

Looked up signal test on the services menu and signal strength is non-existant - that would be the problem then insert wry smile here

We used a local company with a fixed fee.

Does anyone have any idea what a replacement dish/digibox costs if you're already a sky subscriber (i.e. not a new customer deal?)

Can't remember what the guy told me now but if you get one from Sky you can get a reconditioned box for less than a new one.

If you need a new box ring up and tell them you want to cancel you subscription, they will then offer a new box at a reduced rate, if you persist in telling them you want to cancel they eventually offer it for free!