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Wish me luck

Pete Thomas

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We had a problem with our skybox, and my wife discovered from the internet it's a common problem and can be solved by either:

chucking the skybox in the dustbin and buying a new one

or

purchasing an easy £15 DIY repair kit from a website.

I now have a disassembled Skybox and a packet of 12 capacitors to replace the ones on the little board.

Please also wish me (us) luck this evening, I'm off to see saints vs Man U.
 
Good luck and don't forget to wrap up nice and warm.

Is it just me, or does anybody else fantasise about something happening on the pitch (or concert platform/stage etc) and suddenly I am called on to play a starring role ? Remember to take you shin pads just in case.

Rhys
 
Before you get too involved in the "Ripping apart" bit, have you checked on Techy type forum first? It may be a simple fix?
 
We had a problem with our skybox, and my wife discovered from the internet it's a common problem and can be solved by either:

chucking the skybox in the dustbin and buying a new one

or

purchasing an easy £15 DIY repair kit from a website.

I now have a disassembled Skybox and a packet of 12 capacitors to replace the ones on the little board.

Good Luck Pete! I had to replace the box and upgrade!
 
Is it just me, or does anybody else fantasise about something happening on the pitch (or concert platform/stage etc) and suddenly I am called on to play a starring role ? Remember to take you shin pads just in case.

When I've been watching concerts I always seem to drift off thinking I'm up there!
 
Pete
Good luck with the capacitors. If they're the modern tiny surface mount ones they are not easy to solder in unless you know the technique. Even harder to get old ones off first (probably need soldamop)!

You need plenty of luck tonight vs Man U, but I wish it to you as I just don't want them to win it (despite them having some great players....). Was reading in the paper last Sunday how Lawrie McM is virtually forgotten by Saints these days. Sad.
YC.
 
Hi Pete, I did this about a year ago when I started getting very weird behaviour with my original Thomson SkyHD box. Worked a treat though I seem to recall having to re-solder 15 caps. I still get periodic reboots under hard drive load though, which suggests there is something else wrong with the PSU (I'm planning to solve this by using an external SATA caddy with a dedicated PSU). Which supplier did you get the caps from?

Good luck!
 
Hi Pete, I wish you luck tonight (and that from an ex Pompy supporter, what a team those '39 guys were).

As for the Skybox, chuck it in the bin and get on the internet, BBC I Player, ITV Player, SeeSaw and best of all FilmOn!

John
 
Come on the Saints. One of my key childhood memories was sitting with my Dad watchin Saints' memorable cup final win over Man U, and I'd love to see another victory.
 
I'm not a big football fan, but growing up in Manchester one had to support one or the other. Man U for me, and it's been a good choice. Good luck Saints, you'll need it...
 
Ah well, at least the Sky Box is working again.
 
Didn't go to the game, saw it on the box.
Not too many real complaints with that score line :( and heads held relatively high
And now to concentrate upwards and onward!

Not happy about one or two things but with out misplaced elaboration...that's football!


Didn't sound like there were too many Utd fans in St mary's, but I understand at least 4 of them were from Manchester ;}
 
Didn't sound like there were too many Utd fans in St mary's, but I understand at least 4 of them were from Manchester

Quite a few in fact. They nicked the ball when it went into the stand, threw bogrolls onto the pitch, started a fire in the stand and nearly knocked me off my bike on the way home.

And if that isn't enough they bleedin' won when they shoudn't have. That disallowed Saints goal was NOT offside.

The linesman obviously didn't understand the offside rule, if only Sian Massey had been there.
 
A pity Pete. You were certainly looking good and didn't discredit yourselves at all. Up here we have to be satisfied with Crawley Town beating Torquay!
YC
 
Gutted for Pete and his son. He was there wasn't he? Did look but couldn't see any sax players in the crowd. Just hope that we are not slaughtered in our home match at the Millennium on Friday.

Being ancient, wont watch a Murdoch channel but Technisat do a box that receives all Eurobird 28e channels as well as just FreeSat. That means you can get all Sky amongst the six hundred odd TV channels, all you need to do then is find some legal way to decrypt.

On a legal point, if this is a common problem, then there is an underspecification of the original component. Surely the days of electrolytic or any capacitors 'drying out', died in the days of discrete component, build your own, valved HiFi amplifiers?
 
As for the Skybox, chuck it in the bin and get on the internet, BBC I Player, ITV Player, SeeSaw and best of all FilmOn!

John

John, out of interest, what technique do you use on the internet to circumvent the BBC's and ITV's rather anal insistence on blocking non-UK IP addresses from the TV iPlayer (most, but not all, of the radio output is not blocked). Classic FM's method of blocking is to ask you to put in your post code, which is an easy one to deal with!

Here in France I am using slightly modified Vidalia/TOR (a security programme), which works on XP and VISTA, but I can't get it to work with Win 7.
 
Hi Lerome,
The program I use is "TV Abroad" For BBC iPlayer and ITV Player, and SeeSaw, at a cost of 16 Euro's a month.
For watching live TV, I use the excellent "FilmOn" which also has a download facility, the cost for that is £9.95.
My computer is connected to the TV, so I sit back in comfort, with a glass of vino tinto and fall asleep.
Dishes are a thing of the past, internet TV is the way things are going.

John.
 
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Bill raises an interesting point.
I wonder though if it's not the components that are underspecified, but rather the production control is poor. Now I think about it I've found the same thing with other electronics. I used to have a high regard for one European electronics manufacturer - professionally and privately. However, it seems well known now that their (I'm deliberately not naming as I might get sued!) high volume stuff is no longer as reliable now that it is made elsewhere. It's actually the solder bath method that is poorly accomplished with the result that dry joints occur after a while in service - typically at capacitors. So it may not be the caps themselves that have failed, but rather the original solder joint.

There is a fairly crude but very effective method for bringing boards back to life by heating them under careful conditions in an oven. I've used it successfully on small peripheral boards that just seem to have died, but I haven't used it for for main boards so I couldn't recommend it. There is a bit more to it than just shoving it in the oven with the Sunday roast, by the way!
YC
 
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