PVR Wire

Back in May, I moved to a new house and picked up a new Sky+ deal with BSkyB, which came with the newer box with increased capacity (and improvements on the recent software updates). I managed to flog my old box on eBay for £50 and pretty much made back the installation costs at the same time.

However, within a month of the new installation, I started losing channels all over the place, and the only thing which could bring them back was a channel re-scan or a complete planner re-build and a forced software download. So, BSkyB sent out an engineer, who then replaced my Thomson box with a new one.

Over the past few months, the problem has repeated itself, and I've continually found myself bereft of channels, and having to go through the re-scan on a fairly regular basis. When I spoke to the technical support at BSkyB last month about the issue, they sent a stronger update signal to the box, which seemed to cure the problem.

However, the cure was temporary, and the problem resurfaced last week -- so I called up BSkyB and asked them to send out an engineer. The chap who arrived was a pleasant character, and offered to replace not only the box itself, but the LNB on the dish. He even dug out a Pace box from his van for me.

Unfortunately, the Pace box died as he was setting it up, and I had to make do with an Amstrad box. Unfortunately, it means that I've lost a bunch of recordings, some of which I was planning to write about on our siste website, TV Squad.

I'm hopeful that the problem will vanish for good now, but you never can tell. I'll keep everyone posted on the fate of the Amstrad unit, and I'll live in hope that one day a Pace Sky+ box will be mine.