The Irish feed of Sky News is moving to a new transponder as part of a reshuffle of Sky’s standard definition channels.
The change will affect all individuals and organisations in the Republic of Ireland who use a generic satellite receiver. Sky will update its receivers to the new parameters in the coming days.
Until 16th May, Sky News Ireland broadcast on both old and new frequencies during a brief transitional period. As before, the channel is free-to-air.
Sky News Ireland, along with Sky Witness (Irish feed), Virgin One and Virgin Three are moving off 12207 V as part of the change. All services remain on a pan-European beam, alongside free-to-air channels Challenge, Forces TV and Together.
Manual tuning parameters
Satellite: Astra 2E 28.5E Frequency: 11836 Polarisation: Horizontal Symbol Rate: 27500 (27.5 Mbaud) FEC: 5/6 Mode: DVB-S QPSK Service ID: 5406
The ongoing work to optimise Sky’s remaining standard definition services on satellite already resulted in the old Sky News Ireland slot briefly broadcasting at up to 8Mbps. That’s a bitrate up to four times higher that of a normal SD channel. It was caused by the departure of other services, including Sky Sports Action SD, from the transponder. This reduced the overall number of channels allowing the remaining services to soak up the extra bandwidth. In its new slot, Sky News Ireland returns to more normal bitrates for SD channels.
Updated 16/05/2022