Joe came round and used a super-douper meter to confirm that we are getting a strong signal into the house. He managed to get a picture on the box, by dint of fiddling, claiming that he has magic fingers...!
He is of the view that the crane should only interrupt momentarily as it moves. The particular make of box we have is First Generation and unpredictably erratic.
Jimmy and I strolled round to the red crane site and asked to speak to the site manager. He had had a message to call me, and I had done so this morning, but I must have been in the shower. He was a very nice man who immediately understood our problem and sympathised with our loss of telly - he would not have cared to miss Ireland winning the rugby over the weekend! He said he will make sure they park the crane in a position that is of assistance to us, although he warned it will swing round in the wind, it must do otherwise it will break and fall over. And there is a chance we will have interrupted service when it's working. But that sounds reasonable, if not ideal.
Later in the afternoon we settled down to watch the TV. From time to time we got a service interruption lasting from 10-30 seconds before returning. There have been no interruptions since half four. This is quite different from absolutely no service all last week irrespective of whether or not the crane was working or in what position it was.
Although I lack the technical knowledge I can only conclude that we have a minor, liveable with (grudgingly) problem with the crane and a more major problem with the box that means, perhaps, it can't be relied upon to regrab the signal after it's been interrupted. We are going to monitor it for a while, and see what happens. We may end up getting a new box, which will probably be on the cards anyway, seeing as though the model we have is reportedly barely fit for purpose.
I have written a firm but polite email to Sky outlining our problem and their failure properly to investigate it, and stressing the especial misfortune that it messed up this extra-special televisual weekend.
