On the way back from Lidl.........

jeallen01

jeallen01

Specialist Contributor
My Satellite Setup
See Signature
My Location
Somewhere in England (possibly?)!
I was walking past the covered trolley park this afternoon and saw "something" in the litter bin - walked a couple more steps and then went back to see what it was = a Sky+ HD DRX 895C 2TB box in apparently good nick, so I "nicked" it from the bin on the basis that, at worst, it could be a source of spares for the one we use, and/or the two old boxes in the cupboard!

At home, it booted up after several minutes as normal but continually kept telling me that it was "Still initialising" . Did a bit of digging on the net, and found mentioned that the box can do this if the Planner is totally full up, and the only way to clear that is a full factory reset.

Did that from the installers menu, let the box boot back up again - and after quite a lot of "flickering" on the TV guide, it settled down, both Tuners 1 and 2 are working and it is now showing Film4 on Channel 315!!! :)

So the only thing that might be faulty is the disk, but the box tells me that the card in the slot is the "wrong card for the box" and so I can't try recording until I pair our existing SKY+HD card with it - maybe tomorrow afternoon!

Seems like a "result" :)
 
Last edited:
Take twelve Honorary Yorkshireman points, and a half of bitter for your whippet.
 
Personally the only good thing in the sky box of any value would be the hdd.

Unless you’re currently a sky subscriber and wish to use it for multi room or similar.

That being said, nice score :Y
 
Chris1979 said:
Personally the only good thing in the sky box of any value would be the hdd.
Unless you’re currently a sky subscriber and wish to use it for multi room or similar. ...
Click to expand...
I tend to agree with you, but I think that if this one proves to have an OK disk, then it will be kept as the "spare" for the one on the HD subscription, whilst the two old DRX 890s in the cupboard that were kept for that purpose will be stripped instead, and I'll find uses for the disks and any other useful parts in those.
 
It's surprising how many get chucked out! I've had six now out of skips, reset one to keep as a spare and all the others have been broken up and the hard disk removed. Four had Seagate 500GB SATA drives and one had a WD 2TB, not sure if that was a mod or an upgrade but who cares. It's a really useful way of getting free hard drives which come in handy for SDR recordings.
 
aceb said:
.. one had a WD 2TB, not sure if that was a mod or an upgrade but who cares...
Click to expand...
Unless that box was a DRX 895, I don't think it would have had a 2TB disk in it from new.
 
aceb said:
It's surprising how many get chucked out! I've had six now out of skips, reset one to keep as a spare and all the others have been broken up and the hard disk removed. Four had Seagate 500GB SATA drives and one had a WD 2TB, not sure if that was a mod or an upgrade but who cares. It's a really useful way of getting free hard drives which come in handy for SDR recordings.
Click to expand...

The 2Tb box I removed the hard drive from was a western Digital pvr drive.
 
aceb said:
It's surprising how many get chucked out! I've had six now out of skips, reset one to keep as a spare and all the others have been broken up and the hard disk removed. Four had Seagate 500GB SATA drives and one had a WD 2TB, not sure if that was a mod or an upgrade but who cares. It's a really useful way of getting free hard drives which come in handy for SDR recordings.
Click to expand...
If you like salvaging HDDs from STBs, the read this (and weep):

A year and a half ago, our team was were told to clean up what we had in the "warehouse", which was being emptied so that it could be rented out to the local mail and package distribution.

When you build STBs, you go through several iterations of hardware, e.g. early-samples, development boards, and pre-mass-production batches.
This means that you may end up with several generations of STBs, all with different hardware components.
The STB team had a number of early-version hardware boxes sitting in the warehouse.
No use to anyone...

So, during clean-up, one diligent colleague decided to send the 180 brand-new pre-production (and thus un-usabel/un-sellable) PVR STBs that were sitting on pallets straight to recycling as "scrap electronics".
Including the 180 brand-new 1TB 2.5" AV HDDs mounted inside the PVRs...
 
Hard to believe what some people throw out, thinking is junk!

I've seen a few rusty dishes left out in the scrap heap in the past, where the owners obviously thought they were useless due to the rust. Its the same with computers - some people have the mindset that if it's slow, bin it and buy a new one when an OS reinstall would probably have done the job.
 
@st1
I/we will "weep" appropriately - but, hopefully, the boxes went to a recycler who removed and resold the disks so they weren't totally "wasted".
 
dankargo said:
Hard to believe what some people throw out, thinking is junk!

I've seen a few rusty dishes left out in the scrap heap in the past, where the owners obviously thought they were useless due to the rust. Its the same with computers - some people have the mindset that if it's slow, bin it and buy a new one when an OS reinstall would probably have done the job.
Click to expand...
Quite so - at least 2 of my dishes came from the local recycling centres (a very few quids to one of the guys worked there) and another off of next door's wall after someone sold the lodger a "subscription" to "something" that turned out to be rather "temporary"), and the current TD110 came cheap with a TM5402 off ebay. OTOH, the motors were bought new.

As for PC's, someone across the road threw out an old desktop and 17" LCD monitor and was happy for me to take the monitor, which proved very useful when my stepdaughter's similar monitor developed a bad screen fault, and then my wife's cracking Eizo 22" Pro-spec monitor came from a local PC recycler for about £50.
 
I saw a Amstrad SRX200 and a SRD400 being thrown out the other day!
 
I found an dented 88cm mesh dish in a skip in 1995 connected it to the old Pace analogue for 19.2 east 16 east 13 east manual movement,
The pole was sited outside on my balcony & my journey into Satellite TV had begun,

15 satellite dishes, 7 DiSEqC motors, 40 Lnb's & about 50 satellite receivers later I have probably the best set up for FTA TV that you can have.
 
RustySpoons said:
I saw a Amstrad SRX200 and a SRD400 being thrown out the other day!
Click to expand...
Sounds like Captain Jack might have found a use for those - being that he seems well into old analogue systems and "stuff"
 
jeallen01 said:
Sounds like Captain Jack might have found a use for those - being that he seems well into old analogue systems and "stuff"
Click to expand...
I could get them but they are a bit wet!

I had some odd analogue boxes over the years, threw them in the bin! Wish I kept them.

Salora, my first box, absolutely loved this. Had a big dish with a feedhorn LNB with magnetic polarizer, separate Videocrypt decoder
Ferguson which was based on a Grundig iirc, had a Marconi Blue Cap universal LNB and built in Videocrypt
Some Alba wedged shape thing
And one called AB Electronics Wolesy Starlett, never seen another and can't find pictures of it. They were made up the road from me.
 
This is developing into a "what I started with a long time ago" thread! :)

I hope I live long enough to say something like that about the box I "found" today - but it was actually an NEC 5000 system Rx, dish and motor in 1991 in my case!
 
RustySpoons said:
Is there one? if not there should be!
Click to expand...
Actually, I think there is/was and that I posted on it around 3 yrs ago - maybe someone on the Staff could point to that so that RustySpoons could add his contribution?
 
Back
Top