BF
The family has Sky Digital, im just curious more than anything. plugging the old analogue box in for a play with just something that might kill a few hours for me.
BF
We still have the analouge dish up, tho it is rather rusty. Leads still all attached tho into the back bedroom. I'll just pick an old analogue box for a quid from the guy who's always got them at the car boot sale tommorow. I just fancy a 'play' around with it all
harshy posted:
Well Sky Digital is on 28.2E, plugging a FTA Analogue box to it will get you no channels, plugging a digital box will get you a hidden channel AXN Germany which is broadcasting in English lol
We still have the analouge dish up, tho it is rather rusty. Leads still all attached tho into the back bedroom. I'll just pick an old analogue box for a quid from the guy who's always got them at the car boot sale tommorow. I just fancy a 'play' around with it all
HA
We still have the analouge dish up, tho it is rather rusty. Leads still all attached tho into the back bedroom. I'll just pick an old analogue box for a quid from the guy who's always got them at the car boot sale tommorow. I just fancy a 'play' around with it all
Cool, well this is what you should get with it
Link here
Have fun
harshy
Founding member
Bewitched_Fan_2k posted:
harshy posted:
Well Sky Digital is on 28.2E, plugging a FTA Analogue box to it will get you no channels, plugging a digital box will get you a hidden channel AXN Germany which is broadcasting in English lol
We still have the analouge dish up, tho it is rather rusty. Leads still all attached tho into the back bedroom. I'll just pick an old analogue box for a quid from the guy who's always got them at the car boot sale tommorow. I just fancy a 'play' around with it all
Cool, well this is what you should get with it
Link here
Have fun
BF
Cool,
Im not asking how understand, but people always talk of how you can mod freeview boxes to pick up sky, telewest, ntl the works all free of charge
But ive never believed that rubbish
Im not asking how understand, but people always talk of how you can mod freeview boxes to pick up sky, telewest, ntl the works all free of charge
But ive never believed that rubbish
ST
I still have my old Sky analogue box connected (it has surround sound) so everything else is plugged in through that (Video, DVD, Sky+). The old dish is still up and running (yes, I know you are supposed to have planning permission to have 2 dishes up - but one is at the back and one at the front, so nobody notices)
I ocassionaly surf through the analogue channels on 19.2E, although there isn't much of interest on there now. For nostalgic reasons I'm reluctant to disconnect it from the dish though!
I ocassionaly surf through the analogue channels on 19.2E, although there isn't much of interest on there now. For nostalgic reasons I'm reluctant to disconnect it from the dish though!
CW
cwathen
Founding member
A common way of hacking VideoCrypt to get analogue Sky was to use a PC and a piece of software called 'season 7' (so called because it was written by a Star Trek fan who developed it to watch the airings of TNG season 7 for free). Most of the hacking boxes around were designed to circumvent not VideoCrypt, but other encryption systems which were in use on analogue Astra at one time.
Why thankyou Nick.
With Sky Analogue standard analogue satellite receivers with VideoCrypt decoders were used (although of course many were produced with the intention that they'd be used for Sky). There was therefore no fixed channel numbers as there is for Sky Digital, and no autotune function which could assign LCNs to create the more or less universal numbering which DTT has.
There were two 'standard' ways of arranging the channels, the first was in transponder order (this is the list that's been quoted in this thread). The old Amstrad SRX100/200 receivers defaulted to this arrangement, with preset 1 relating to Astra 1A transponder 1, preset 2 to transponder 2 etc (up to 16 - the receiver only had 16 presets because Astra 1A only had 16 transponders). This was OK at first, but quickly became stupid (especially with the Germand and English channels being mixed together all over the place) and as more channels and then more satellites launched. (Curiousity of this numbering system including things like RTL2 on channel 1, but RTL'1' on channel 2, Sky One appearing on channel 8 etc). New satellite receivers were either numbered this way or individual manufacturers had their own default settings designed to be more logical.
When Sky went down the road of wide-scale encryption in 1993/4, they introduced their own 'recommended channel lineup' in an effort to get the channel numbers standardised. Virtually all consumer level equipment destined for use with Sky was quickly delivered using Sky's recommended numbers (and then added the foreign channels in a separate group). For a while, Sky even offered to send someone out to your house to retune your receiver in this standard order if you so desired.
The new numbering system was more sensible at first but by the end it had started to become a bit weird in itself (Sky Sports 3 separated from Sky Sports 1 and 2 etc).
As others have said, Sky Analogue officially ended on September 30th 2001 (however, the Fox News Channel was actually provided by Sky until early 2002, even if they didn't acknowledge it). However, the service was wound down long before that. The eventual closure of the analogue service was announced in early 2000, at which point they stopped accepting new subscribers to the service, shortly after that a phased closure programme began. From 2001 this became very agressive, with huge blocks of channels being removed overnight. Most of the FTA English language channels timed their closures to one of Sky's big closure days, making the rate at which channels fell off the platform even more alarming. In the very final days Sky One, Sky Sports 2 and Sky Premier (i.e. one from each tier) were the only channels left! Apparently around 200 subscribers held on to the bitter end (quite who was mad enough to subscriber to a £15 / month 'multichannel package' consisting of 1 channel, possibly adding a 'sports package' of 1 channel and a 'movie package' of 1 channel making for at best 3 channels for £30/month I don't know).
Quote:
Try a PM to Chris Wathen, "cwathen".
He's the forum expert on analogue Astra.
He's the forum expert on analogue Astra.
Why thankyou Nick.
With Sky Analogue standard analogue satellite receivers with VideoCrypt decoders were used (although of course many were produced with the intention that they'd be used for Sky). There was therefore no fixed channel numbers as there is for Sky Digital, and no autotune function which could assign LCNs to create the more or less universal numbering which DTT has.
There were two 'standard' ways of arranging the channels, the first was in transponder order (this is the list that's been quoted in this thread). The old Amstrad SRX100/200 receivers defaulted to this arrangement, with preset 1 relating to Astra 1A transponder 1, preset 2 to transponder 2 etc (up to 16 - the receiver only had 16 presets because Astra 1A only had 16 transponders). This was OK at first, but quickly became stupid (especially with the Germand and English channels being mixed together all over the place) and as more channels and then more satellites launched. (Curiousity of this numbering system including things like RTL2 on channel 1, but RTL'1' on channel 2, Sky One appearing on channel 8 etc). New satellite receivers were either numbered this way or individual manufacturers had their own default settings designed to be more logical.
When Sky went down the road of wide-scale encryption in 1993/4, they introduced their own 'recommended channel lineup' in an effort to get the channel numbers standardised. Virtually all consumer level equipment destined for use with Sky was quickly delivered using Sky's recommended numbers (and then added the foreign channels in a separate group). For a while, Sky even offered to send someone out to your house to retune your receiver in this standard order if you so desired.
The new numbering system was more sensible at first but by the end it had started to become a bit weird in itself (Sky Sports 3 separated from Sky Sports 1 and 2 etc).
Quote:
does analogue sky actully still work? if you plug it all in and see I mean
As others have said, Sky Analogue officially ended on September 30th 2001 (however, the Fox News Channel was actually provided by Sky until early 2002, even if they didn't acknowledge it). However, the service was wound down long before that. The eventual closure of the analogue service was announced in early 2000, at which point they stopped accepting new subscribers to the service, shortly after that a phased closure programme began. From 2001 this became very agressive, with huge blocks of channels being removed overnight. Most of the FTA English language channels timed their closures to one of Sky's big closure days, making the rate at which channels fell off the platform even more alarming. In the very final days Sky One, Sky Sports 2 and Sky Premier (i.e. one from each tier) were the only channels left! Apparently around 200 subscribers held on to the bitter end (quite who was mad enough to subscriber to a £15 / month 'multichannel package' consisting of 1 channel, possibly adding a 'sports package' of 1 channel and a 'movie package' of 1 channel making for at best 3 channels for £30/month I don't know).
BI
There's loads of houses round here with 2 dishes. I doubt anyone cares to be honest.
StuartPlymouth posted:
I still have my old Sky analogue box connected (it has surround sound) so everything else is plugged in through that (Video, DVD, Sky+). The old dish is still up and running (yes, I know you are supposed to have planning permission to have 2 dishes up - but one is at the back and one at the front, so nobody notices)
There's loads of houses round here with 2 dishes. I doubt anyone cares to be honest.
BF
Maybe they just feared change?
Quote:
Apparently around 200 subscribers held on to the bitter end (quite who was mad enough to subscriber to a £15 / month 'multichannel package' consisting of 1 channel, possibly adding a 'sports package' of 1 channel and a 'movie package' of 1 channel making for at best 3 channels for £30/month I don't know).
Maybe they just feared change?
DJ
I still have my old Sky analogue box connected (it has surround sound) so everything else is plugged in through
that (Video, DVD, Sky+). The old dish is still up and running (yes, I know you are supposed to have planning
permission to have 2 dishes up - but one is at the back and one at the front, so nobody notices)
I ocassionaly surf through the analogue channels on 19.2E, although there isn't much of interest
on there now. For nostalgic reasons I'm reluctant to disconnect it from the dish though!
There's loads of houses round here with 2 dishes. I doubt anyone cares to be honest.
Indeed ... alongside my 45cm Sky digital minidish (installed on 16th January 1999) is our old 60cm analog dish. That's been
attached to the side of our gaff, since September 1993! I can't remember the exact date, but that's really beside the point.
http://djgm.co.uk/stuff/where-my-satellite-dishes-are.png
(And yes, I have posted that pic before ... IIRC, 21st March 2004.)
FWIW ... the analog dish has worked consistently better than the digital dish. Whenever we've had very strong winds, our
digital dish would become slightly misaligned, maybe by only a couple of millimetres and at least half of the channels
would be blocky and breaking up, or showing the annoying message "No satellite signal is being received".
We've had local satellite dish technicians out to try and sort it 4 times. Twice charged at £25, and twice charged at £10.
Everytime we've plugged the old analog dish back into our old Grundig box, all the still available are still there, albeit
with all of them being German, and some of them having a minor case of what was often referred to as "sparklies".
StuartPlymouth posted:
I still have my old Sky analogue box connected (it has surround sound) so everything else is plugged in through
that (Video, DVD, Sky+). The old dish is still up and running (yes, I know you are supposed to have planning
permission to have 2 dishes up - but one is at the back and one at the front, so nobody notices)
I ocassionaly surf through the analogue channels on 19.2E, although there isn't much of interest
on there now. For nostalgic reasons I'm reluctant to disconnect it from the dish though!
big_fat posted:
There's loads of houses round here with 2 dishes. I doubt anyone cares to be honest.
Indeed ... alongside my 45cm Sky digital minidish (installed on 16th January 1999) is our old 60cm analog dish. That's been
attached to the side of our gaff, since September 1993! I can't remember the exact date, but that's really beside the point.
http://djgm.co.uk/stuff/where-my-satellite-dishes-are.png
(And yes, I have posted that pic before ... IIRC, 21st March 2004.)
FWIW ... the analog dish has worked consistently better than the digital dish. Whenever we've had very strong winds, our
digital dish would become slightly misaligned, maybe by only a couple of millimetres and at least half of the channels
would be blocky and breaking up, or showing the annoying message "No satellite signal is being received".
We've had local satellite dish technicians out to try and sort it 4 times. Twice charged at £25, and twice charged at £10.
Everytime we've plugged the old analog dish back into our old Grundig box, all the still available are still there, albeit
with all of them being German, and some of them having a minor case of what was often referred to as "sparklies".
DM
We have the same type of cable relay system here in Irvine in Scotland. It was originally owned by Irvine Cable TV and was taken over by BT Cable TV services in the 90s (BT also owned the Milton Keynes service as well as they had some people up from Milton Keynes to promote the service at one point). BT gave up the service around 1999/2000 and it is now owned by Metro Cable TV Ltd, however, they plan to cease the service on 30th September 2006.
Anyway back in the 80s we used to receive the 4 main channels and also BBC1 Northern Ireland and Ulster TV on the UHF band. If you had a TV with a VHF tuner you could pick up all of the cable channels including movies and sport for free. This lasted for a few years but eventually the must have cottoned on and started to scramble the channels.
When BT took over they removed BBC 1 NI and replaced it with Sky 1 and also added NBC Superchannel. They also used to have occasional preview weekends in which they would replace Ulster TV on Fri-Mon with other channels like Bravo/UK Gold etc to try to get people to subscribe to those channels. When Channel 5 launched NBC Superchannel was removed from the relay line up and replace by C5. During the time of BT's ownership only a couple of other channels could be picked up using the VHF band these were QVC, Sky News, L!ve TV and Cartoon Network/TNT.
When Metro Cable TV took over Ulster TV was removed and replaced with ITV2 and they also added another channel to the UHF frequency which has BBC 3 and Cbeebies timesharing on it. Channels available on the VHF band now are Sky News and BBC News 24. The other cable channels can still be picked up on the VHF band but they are all scrambled. The UHF band currently looks like this:
UHF 22: Sky One
UHF 24: Channel 4
UHF 28: BBC 2 Scotland
UHF 30: BBC 1 Scotland
UHF 32: ITV2
UHF 34: Scottish TV
UHF 38: Five
UHF 40: Cbeebies/BBC 3
The service is due to cease on 30th September 2006 and just today we received a letter from the local council to inform us that we shall be receiving £50 payment from them to help cover the costs of having to find an alternative way of receiving a TV signal!
russnet posted:
Although not 100% relevant to the thread, I've currently got the basic analogue relay cable service in Milton Keynes. It consists of the five main channels including Anglia and Central South Regions as the ITV main channel, Sky One, QVC and News 24.
Set up wise is just a usual tv to video type cable running from the tv into the wall socket. However on my tv, it can go further down the band when tuning in and can go past the 21-69 UHF signal which for the analogue cable service in MK uses these frequencies. A lot of channels are partitally encrypted, meaning that depending on whats being played sometimes you can hear whats on and sometimes can see whats being shown but you could never be able to watch for more than 5 seconds.
As mentioned, a lot of channels are encrypted but unencryped on the tuning search means I can get E4, Sky News and Price Drop TV and CNBC from the hours of 5-9am. There was one point a couple of summers ago where we got CNN, MTV, Discovery, UK Gold and a couple of others but that liteally lasted a few days
Set up wise is just a usual tv to video type cable running from the tv into the wall socket. However on my tv, it can go further down the band when tuning in and can go past the 21-69 UHF signal which for the analogue cable service in MK uses these frequencies. A lot of channels are partitally encrypted, meaning that depending on whats being played sometimes you can hear whats on and sometimes can see whats being shown but you could never be able to watch for more than 5 seconds.
As mentioned, a lot of channels are encrypted but unencryped on the tuning search means I can get E4, Sky News and Price Drop TV and CNBC from the hours of 5-9am. There was one point a couple of summers ago where we got CNN, MTV, Discovery, UK Gold and a couple of others but that liteally lasted a few days
We have the same type of cable relay system here in Irvine in Scotland. It was originally owned by Irvine Cable TV and was taken over by BT Cable TV services in the 90s (BT also owned the Milton Keynes service as well as they had some people up from Milton Keynes to promote the service at one point). BT gave up the service around 1999/2000 and it is now owned by Metro Cable TV Ltd, however, they plan to cease the service on 30th September 2006.
Anyway back in the 80s we used to receive the 4 main channels and also BBC1 Northern Ireland and Ulster TV on the UHF band. If you had a TV with a VHF tuner you could pick up all of the cable channels including movies and sport for free. This lasted for a few years but eventually the must have cottoned on and started to scramble the channels.
When BT took over they removed BBC 1 NI and replaced it with Sky 1 and also added NBC Superchannel. They also used to have occasional preview weekends in which they would replace Ulster TV on Fri-Mon with other channels like Bravo/UK Gold etc to try to get people to subscribe to those channels. When Channel 5 launched NBC Superchannel was removed from the relay line up and replace by C5. During the time of BT's ownership only a couple of other channels could be picked up using the VHF band these were QVC, Sky News, L!ve TV and Cartoon Network/TNT.
When Metro Cable TV took over Ulster TV was removed and replaced with ITV2 and they also added another channel to the UHF frequency which has BBC 3 and Cbeebies timesharing on it. Channels available on the VHF band now are Sky News and BBC News 24. The other cable channels can still be picked up on the VHF band but they are all scrambled. The UHF band currently looks like this:
UHF 22: Sky One
UHF 24: Channel 4
UHF 28: BBC 2 Scotland
UHF 30: BBC 1 Scotland
UHF 32: ITV2
UHF 34: Scottish TV
UHF 38: Five
UHF 40: Cbeebies/BBC 3
The service is due to cease on 30th September 2006 and just today we received a letter from the local council to inform us that we shall be receiving £50 payment from them to help cover the costs of having to find an alternative way of receiving a TV signal!