My Sky Programmes Keep Breaking Up So I Called In An Engineer

[gollob]

He said that your dish is being blocked by trees from a property at least 200 metres away Do I have any redress to tell them to cut the tops off their trees or give up having Sky

[Guilbert53]

You could get Sky to move the dish. It will cost you though.

[4candles]

200 metres?? They must be very tall trees.

[Postdog]

Sounds like bovine excretion to me! Trees blocking signals from space!!

[DarceyK123]

I agree with Postdog, total rubbish.

[woofgang]

I have had trouble with trees blocking the signal too, and not my trees. No you can't require the neighbours to trim their trees to get your Sky signal. The sky tech moved my dish for me at no charge.

[Hopkirk]

How high up your building is your dish?

Did the engineer not talk to you about the possibility of raising it up?

[Georgiesmum]

Sounds like all that is needed is for you to reposition your dish.

[4candles]

Postdog said "Sounds like bovine excretion to me! Trees blocking signals from space!!"
The signal doesn't come down vertically!! The angle of elevation is about 19° in Inverness and 26° in London, so it's quite common for trees to block Sky signals.
It does seem though that either it's a lot less than 200 metres, or they're extremely tall trees.

[pixie374]

Trees can block the signal. There is no harm in asking your neighbours- and offering to pay...

[pixie374]

Or a booster if it's intermittent? I don't know if that might help.

[woofgang]

My dish was as high as it would go on my house. When we first got a dish when it was called bskyb, there was a "thing" about having dishes on the front of the house, I believe it was even banned in some areas of Britain. Eventually local trees grew too high to get a signal so this year it was moved to the front of the house and its fine again

[ABerrant]

Just to give a clear picture of the engineer's explanation (see what I did there!) -

a tree 200m distance from a Sky satellite dish would need to extend at least 63m (~200 ft) above the dish to interfere with the signal (based on the location being the very northerly Stornoway).

For the very southerly Dover the minimum figure is 100m (~330 ft) or nearly the height of the tallest Sequoia.