Cannot change to radio channels

Advertisements

We just had a Sky engineer in to fix a problem with some channels missing. He replaced the box, so we now have an Amstrad Sky+ box instead of a Thompson.

After he'd left we found that the Tivo could't change TV channels reliably until we changed the IR settings from fast to medium. Then we noticed that we couldn't select radio channels at all. We can select radio channels directly on the Sky+ box, but when the Tivo changes to a radio channel we never see the leading 0 being sent. e.g. change to radio 4 0104 always ends up on Channel 4 104.

Any ideas what we can do? My guess would be that the Amstrad is taking too long to respond to the Sky key and missing the first 0 in the channel, but that's only a guess.

 

The fast codes worked reliably for the old Thompson box. The problem with the new box isn't the speed though: even the slow code doesn't work at all for selecting radio channels. It selects a channel reliably, but the leading zero is missed not just sometimes but every single time.

I suspect the box just needs an abnormally long pause after the sky key before the leading zero. Is it possible to customise that delay? I can telnet in to the box, but I don't know where to find instructions on hacking channel change codes.

 

Advertisements

I don't think there is a codeset without the Sky button. The Sky Radio codesets are 20057 (for Sky) and 20058 for Sky+. We're using 20017 medium for TV (which works), and 20058 slow for radio (which changes channel ok, just not to the radio channels).

The point is that it was all working with the Thompson box and the Tivo box wasn't even restarted when the box was switched. Unless changing the TV code from fast to medium somehow confused the Tivo over how to change the radio channels I can't think of any reason why the Tivo would have stopped sending the leading 0.

Anyway the Amstrad box started showing sound problems so we had the engineer back this week to switch the box again. Of course the sound wasn't playing up when he came, but we'd recorded the problem on the Tivo so he could hear it! Unfortunately he only had Amstrads, so we're on our second Amstrad and it still shows exactly the same issues with changing channels (but fortunately not yet any problems with the sound).

Picture quality is ok on both: of course we've got a 12 year old CRT TV so I can't say how either would look on a better set. We're thinking of upgrading the TV sometime soon, so at that point we might decide that either or both of the Tivo and Sky+ aren't up to scratch.