Installing Sky Digital

As a general rule, we wouldn’t recommend you install Sky yourself. It can be incredibly fiddly aligning the dish and can take several hours to complete. We would always suggest using a local satellite installer to do this for you.

However we understand that you may want to have the cables ran internally through cavity walls and some satellite installers won’t do this for you. So we’ve put together the following brief guide to give you some basic knowledge of how to install a satellite and TV distribution system.

Designing your system

Making sure you have the correct equipment ensures that you will save a lot of time during installation, so we’ll start off by designing the system to make sure you understand fully what you are trying to achieve.

Basic Satellite installation

For a basic Sky Digital installation you will need –

• Sky Minidish
• Sky Digibox
• Cable
• Cable Clips
• 2 x F Connectors
• 4 x Coach Bolts (to attach the dish to the wall)
• Self Amalgamating Tape (to make the connection to the LNB waterproof)

We do sell installation kits which include everything you need to install your Sky system.

Installing the dish

The Sky minidish is very simple to put together, simply follow the instructions included with your dish.

The dish needs to be aligned at 28.2 degrees East of South, before you even drill a hole in the wall make sure your wall faces in the right direction. Tip, look at your neighbours’ properties, somebody around you is sure to have Sky installed, look at which direction their dish is pointing.

Once you have installed the dish you need to run the cable to the room your receiver is going to be installed.

Start at the top and work down you should clip the cable every 50cm, always run the cable horizontally or vertically, never diagonally across a wall.

Fitting the F connector

Strip the end of the cable as shown below –

Once you have stripped the cable, twist the braid and pull it back on itself, make sure that no braid is touching the copper core, this will cause a short on the cable and you will not get any signal.

Now, simply twist on the F’ connector and connect to the LNB and receiver.

Follow the instructions in your Digibox manual to connect the Digibox to your TV.

Once you have everything connected you need to align your dish. If you have purchased a satellite meter from us follow the instructions included.

Aligning the dish

Now you have done the easy bit, it’s time for the hard part.

This is impossible to do with just one person, you need to have two people, one to align the dish and one to watch the TV screen for signal.

• Switch the Digibox on, you will see a message on the screen saying ‘No signal being received’
• Press service
• Press 6

You will now see two signal strength meters on the screen. One will be Signal Strength and the other Signal Quality.

You will probably notice that there is some signal strength straight away, don’t get excited, this is only reading ‘noise’ from the atmosphere. It is the signal quality that you need; this is reading a specific transponder from the Sky satellite.

The next bit will probably cause a few arguments, so go and make a cup of tea before you start.

With one person watching the screen, the other person needs to go and move the dish around until the signal strength display starts to read a decent signal level, about 50% should be fine. This is not as easy as it may sound, the dish needs to be within 0.1 of a degree of the satellite (about 1mm in movement terms). And to make life even more difficult the signal strength meter is about 0.5 seconds behind, so you can’t just sweep the dish around the sky, you need to make very precise, very subtle movements of the dish, stopping for a couple of seconds after each movement.

Once you have some signal strength, make tiny movements of the dish both horizontally and vertically to get the best signal quality possible. Once you have about 50% signal quality, tighten the dish up (without moving it), tape the connection on the LNB up with amalgamating tape to make it waterproof, and hey presto you’re ready to go.

You may find that you have loads of signal strength and no quality, this probably means that you are aligned to the wrong satellite, check your bearings, have a good look at the neighbours dish and start again.

This is by far the hardest way to align your satellite dish, and can take several HOURS to do, unless you are determined to align the dish yourself, call a local installer, once you have your dish on the wall and your receiver connected up, they will probably only charge you £25-35 to align the dish for you.