Sky Hd customers using a single satellite feed

In the past with a standard satellite set up you have only needed one feed from your sky dish lnb to your satellite box to enjoy the benefits of sky television.Then in 2003 sky plus was born were you could record, pause, rewind and fast forward recorded programmes saved on the sky plus internal hard drive, The only downside was a twin output lnb (Nowreplaced by quad LNBS)required fitting and an extra cable needed run to the box as the box required two lnb inputs so you could watch one thing whilst recording something else on another channel.When sky Hd was created the technology of the sky plus box was used with the box in the same way except for the addition of sky hd with extra outputs available on the box but the principles were still the same, for the box to work and record properly you still required two lnb inputs.This was all fine and well in a house but it become a problem for any body living in a block of flats served from a communal satellite system.generally all that would be available would be a single satellite feed ( To keep installation costs and equipment costs low) in each flat connected to a multiswitch somewhere that was served by one satellite dish some where on a rooftop and nine times out often landlords or property companies would not allow an extra cable to be taken to the multiswitch or cable ran outside along a wall as it would be extra cost andcould become an eyesore if everybody wanted itand multiple cables were to run round the front of a nicely finished building! therefore it wasapain for any body owning a sky box or a sky Hd box as they could only use dish input 1 on the box and generally if they wanted to record something they had to sit and watch it.Global comms made a device called an sps1 smart priority switch as shown below (now defunct but production has reportadely started again)

This was a handy device that gave flat owners and single feed users a bit more flexibility with their sky and sky HD boxes but still had limitations to it.The single lnb would connect to it then you would connect a fly lead to outputs a and b and connect these to dish inputs 1 and 2 on your box.Another lead would connect to the scart out on your sky box to power the unit and depending if the sky box was on or off would prioritise one of the outputs, Usually when the sky box was on, output A would have priority and when it was in standby then output B would have priority but this was still somewhat of a nuisance and people would still end up with failed recordings.Therefore after much debate and forums posted on the web the engineers at sky must of taken some notice and have decided to build a new feature in to there updated epg (electronic programme guide) called single feed.I have not yet been able to try this out yet but when my own epg is updated then i will try it and post out the results, I do know that selecting the single feed option disables the sky anytime oad service as this requires the two tuners to operate, one for viewing and one for downloading but i dare say there will be a way round this.Currently the single feed method is only available to sky HD customers so sky owners will have to put up with limited features on there sky boxes or go out and buy a sky HD box, Perhaps this is clever marketing and money making by sky!!.The good thing though is that flat ownerswho have sky HD with asingle feed will be able to nowhave more features on their boxand be able to enjoy all the full features of sky television.To enable single feed mode just read my guide below:

Single feed users

( ONLY AVAILABLE TO SKY HD USERS WITH THE NEW EPG)

First make sure you are using single feed, check the back of your sky hd box and you will find that there will be only one cable connected to the dish input and that dish input 2 will be vacant

Press services on your remote control, "options" in the top will be highlighted orange

Press the right arrow once and highlight "Settings" in the top menu

Now press down once and go to the middle menu and highlight "picture"

Press "0,1, SELECT" on your remote quickly, This should highlight the setup box within the hidden menu

Now scroll down to the single feed mode

Press the right arrow once to switch single feed mode on

Now press the green button to save your settings

If you have done it properly you will get a message on screen saying "Your sky box is ready to be rebooted and selecting this option disables sky anytime"

Now press "Select" and the box will go into standby and will reboot itself (This should take a few minutes to complete ) Once done you should be able to use your sky HD box as normal for recording etc giving you extra features which you didnt have before.

Hope you find this guide helpfull and please take a moment to rate it after you have finished.Please check out my other guides coming soon, All the best Ade.