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Sly q LNBs

peterpi

peterpi

Member
What's the deal with using a Sly Q lnb on a Freesat receiver?

My son has finally listened to me, and given them the elbow but his Humax Freesat Box is not compatible with the Q LNB. How have they screwed yet one more thing down with their control freakery. Different mixdown IF at the receiver?
 
Sky LNBs use a wideband IF with no separate Hi and Lo selection. They're not compatible with "standard" receiver+LNBs which have H/V and Hi/Lo selection sent up to the LNB.
 
The latest freesat 4k boxes (made by Arris for freesat) are compatible with the $ky Q LNBs though... ;)
(and give four tuner access, rather than limited to two).

It's a simple swap of the LNB on the dish - provided it can be safely accessed.
 
peterpi said:
How have they screwed yet one more thing down with their control freakery. Different mixdown IF at the receiver?
Click to expand...
When ordering Sky Q there was an option (and perhaps still is) to pay £50 extra to install an LNB that is compatible with both wideband and traditional. Judging from a few posts elsewhere on the internet, Sky don't appear to be smoothly set up to deliver that option, or make it obvious what it gives the customer.

The old non-wideband LNBs only had enough bandwidth to supply about a quarter of the available channels down each single cable. What this meant is that the receiver/recorder had to tell the LNB which quarter it wanted down a particular cable. With the newer wideband setup each cable could send half the channels down a single cable, and so no switching is required during use, but as a result a double cable is always needed. The lack of switching does provide more flexibility when adding other wideband capable receivers and amplifiers, but unless a hybrid LNB is used, lacks the ability to use legacy non-wideband equipment from the same LNB.

If you want an LNB that can cope with both legacy and wideband then look for a "Hybrid" LNB. When I last looked they were only a few pounds more, and in my opinion Sky's £50 extra was a bit OTT.
 
Thanks for all the heads up. I've not subscribed for over ten years as I don't like their business model. My son signed migrated his mobile service to them as it was "a really good price". Except call waiting is £2.50 a month extra, voice mail is £2.50 a month extra and the last time I checked they were charging £3.00 a month to block up to ten numbers, even though Android mobiles have the option to block any number of nuisance callers.
 
Rodders53 said:
The latest freesat 4k boxes (made by Arris for freesat) are compatible with the $ky Q LNBs though... ;)
(and give four tuner access, rather than limited to two).

It's a simple swap of the LNB on the dish - provided it can be safely accessed.
Click to expand...
For anyone considering that with a Hybrid LNB, one thing to bear in mind from the Freesat site...

Hybrid LNB’s work with our new 4K Box as well as older Freesat Boxes, letting you record up to four shows at the same time. You will need to ensure that your Box is plugged into the Wideband outputs of a Hybrid LNB. This will show up on the Box as “Wideband LNB” Some Hybrid LNBs do not have dedicated Wideband outputs. For these, any output will work with your Box, however you may only be able to record up to two shows at once.

I believe the 1st hybrid LNB Sky released (EL010?) does not have dedicated Wideband outputs, the later one (EL028?) does.
 
It's not explicit that I can find, but I guess a wideband feed is detected by the range of IFs present. What I haven't been able to figure out is how a hybrid LNB without dedicated wideband ports works.
 
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