Sky Q boxes out of sight?

exfordy

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We are considering Sky Q. The main TV would be in the lounge on a wall behind which is the garage. This would allow all the cables to go through the wall into the garage and the main Sky Q box to be in the garage, out of sight.
The second TV is in the kitchen on a stud wall which has the cables inside coming out behind a sideboard. The secondary wifi Sky Q Mini box would be inside the sideboard, out of sight.
Is the main Sky Q box capable of having a feed from a 'magic eye' remote control sensor which could be fixed to the bottom of the lounge TV? Is this an unnecessary consideration as the Sky Q touch remote is Bluetooth enabled? I.e. will the Bluetooth work through the wall?
Presumably the secondary Sky Q Mini box being wifi can readily be in a cupboard out of sight?
 
The Silver box should be fine on bluetooth, although you might have to check if it is a block wall.

I would be more worried about the wifi. If you put the silver box through a block wall from the mini and then there are further stud walls the wifi signal will likely not be strong enough. Sky can use wireless boosters, but these kill your wifi speeds. Also where is your wifi router? Ideally it will be next to the silver box.

It is better to use wired connections, depending on the wiring in your house you may be able to use powerline or you may be able to get ethernet connections in.

If you put the mini in a cupboard you will need another Bluetooth remote for £40, it cannot be controlled over wifi like Sky HD can.
 
The standard Mini remotes are IR. The Silver box comes with one ir and one Bluetooth remote so if it doesn't need Bluetooth you can use that with a Mini.
 
Thanks. Is the main Sky Q box capable of having a feed from a 'magic eye' remote control sensor which could be fixed to the bottom of the lounge TV?
 
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No, as they don't have an RF input or output, nor do they have an IR extender input as seen on some devices.

TBH the Bluetooth remote is a massive improvement over the Magic Eyes which I found slow and unreliable.

What is odd is that you cannot currently use the Sky Q app to control the box as with the Sky+ app and the HD box. People seem to believe that this will come in the future.
 
Thanks again. Do you think the Bluetooth would work through the single skin brick wall?
 
The honest answer is I am not sure.

Mine works fine through a stud wall and my guess is it would be fine as it just has to connect, it is not affected by slowdown like wifi.

If i was home I would check it out, but I'm not home until Friday.
 
No panic - we have much yet to decide like what TV to get to go with Sky Q (if we get it). If you are able to prove out operation through a solid wall that would be very much appreciated.
 
As mentioned in earlier post I would be very worried about the wifi signal with that setup.

One: the silver box needs to communicate with the router over 5ghz wifi (unless you cable it).
Two: the silver box needs to communicate with the mini over 5ghz wifi (unless you cable it).

The big issue is that 5ghz signals do not penetrate walls very well or have the range of the 2.4Ghz signals.

Most of the issues I have read with Q have been down to the boxes not being able to communicate with each other. The engineer who installed mine was very relieved to find that my mini was going to be directly above the silver, so only a ceiling to go through. He confirmed that the installations where the boxes are several walls apart are a nightmare.

There is of course Powerline which should help with all of that, and appears to have just been enabled by Sky this week. No word of when they will support it though.
 
So there should be no issue if they are connected via ethernet cables?is it just the existing sky hd cable from the dish they use?
Im thinking of putting my mini upstairs in a cupboard then using hdmi splitters to my bedroom tvs and living room- You can get a second bluetooth remote from e bay for £20
 
"Should" be ok with Ethernet but as the silver box needs to connect to the router then you will need an Ethernet switch. (Only one Ethernet socket on the back of the boxes).

But, you are sort of not doing it the way it was designed to work and I am not sure if Sky will support it cabled. (Lots of talk on the Sky forums of some engineers doing it, others not, some persevering with the wireless setup, fitting boosters etc).

A new LNB will be fitted to your dish as part of the installation but, yes, the existing cabling from the dish is used to go into the back of the silver box. The mini box gets everything from the silver via wifi/possibly Powerline soon (or Ethernet...). So a lot of data streaming to the mini.

The silver gets On Demand, some of the menu items and all UHD content (except football) from the Internet. I am not sure if when you use On Demand on the mini it pulls it down from the Internet to the Silver and then streams to your mini, or if the mini pulls it in itself. I am guessing the former.

Do you have Sky broadband? If you do then you get the added "bonus" of all of the boxes acting as wifi hotspots. This really works and gives me much better signal for phones/tablets etc in previously cold areas of the house.

Great in theory, but as Android doesn't seem to do roaming at all then it is actually worse sometimes as you are connected to the nearest box to you when you turn on wifi on your phone. It holds on to that connection when you move around so you can end up sitting next to your router but still connected to a poor signal from upstairs! Android problem, not Sky.
 
PS why hide the boxes? They are very much smaller than the old HD+ boxes and pretty cool looking. You'll miss out on the cool blue pulsating Q on the silver box. :)
 
thanks for the reply reg

basically im not bothered about hiding the boxes its just i want to at least get the mini into the centre of the house,then im hoping a bluetooth remote will control from other rooms in the house as its my intention to distribute the signal into the bedrooms kitchen and living room.

so am i right in saying its just one cable from the dish into the main 4k box and then the mini will connect either by ethernet or wifi?

if theres a shortage of ethernet ports can i not just use old routers (which is what i currently do now)
 
sounds like it would work in theory but totally subject to how well the bluetooth is going to work through walls etc.

Yes, there is one satellite feed cable into the main box (well, the double cable you get with Sky+, technically two cables then!). Plus the main box needs to connect to the Internet.
 
i should be ok then,ill just move the boxes around the house untill the remotes work in my other rooms.
i did the house up a few years ago and have the satellite cable and ethernet and hdmi cables running everywhere.
 
Thanks for the responses. I might try the silver box in the garage, the other side of the wall the lounge tv will be on and if that doesn't work bring the cabling back through the wall in a less obtrusive place for the box to be sited.
 
I'll try and test the bluetooth range when I get home.

I have been lead to believe that ethernet is now the preferred connection route, some people even say the Sky guys have put in cabling. I had mine put in the first week when they had been told only to use wi-fi. I immediately moved it over to ethernet when they left.

I just use cheap ethernet switches due to the lack of ethernet ports in the Minis, I have a 5 port and 8 port switch and they work perfectly, they are TP-Link and cost around £15 from Amazon.

Once connected by ethernet the wi-fi hotspots are fantastic. As pointed out they only work with sky broadband, I now get 30MBs almost everywhere in the house. My wife does have a habit of walking around using FaceTime and Facebook Messenger. This causes a problem as not only does the signal drop out often as it moves from one box to another, but there is a bug in FB Messenger os it uses 3G when it loses wi-fi, even if you switch off the option for it to use 3G on your iPhone. Anyway for normal people who use wi-fi without walking around it is great.
 
Once connected by ethernet the wi-fi hotspots are fantastic. As pointed out they only work with sky broadband, I now get 30MBs almost everywhere in the house. My wife does have a habit of walking around using FaceTime and Facebook Messenger. This causes a problem as not only does the signal drop out often as it moves from one box to another, but there is a bug in FB Messenger os it uses 3G when it loses wi-fi, even if you switch off the option for it to use 3G on your iPhone. Anyway for normal people who use wi-fi without walking around it is great.

I have read that to enable Ethernet you have to disable wifi on the boxes (and it is not straightforward to do so). I assumed that that turned off the hotspots?

Are you saying that ios roams OK? Android sure doesn't!
 
Maybe the confusion is that ethernet has to be switched on, I think it is switched on by default, but there is an option to enable it. There is no need to disable the wifi.

I did disable wifi on my Silver box as it is right next to the Q hub and having too many boxes broadcasting wifi causes congestion which can slow it down, other than that there is no reason to switch it off.

iOS roams, it takes about 10 seconds to switch from one Mini to another. This is fine normally, but during a video call it freezes and says reconnecting. However the iPhone will use 3G to fill in the blank, even if you switch off 3G for individual applications and even if wifi assist is switched off. Thus my wife can blow through her 3G allowance in a day as she might make an hour of video calls. The only way around this seems to be to switch data off altogether when she is at home. This is purely an issue when roaming from box to box on video calls, it has no effect on my data usage.
 

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