[Chris]

It really could be any of the above, especially as you don't know what may have happened to the dish in the past. Can you visually inspect the quality of the connections between the cables and the LNB? Can you take a close look at the f-plugs on the living-room end of the cables? Have you tried both of the pair of cables?

The dish could be out of line but it's not very likely, unless it's sitting somewhere it could have been knocked. If possible, give it a very gentle nudge to see if it is still firmly in place on its bracket. It can be tricky to actually adjust the dish without a handheld signal finder though. Still, unless it's way off-beam it should be picking up something, even if very weak.

The LNB itself could have died. You can replace these cheaply enough but if you're buying a non-Sky one, be sure to also order the correct adaptor for fixing it onto the Sky minidish (yep, Sky unsurprisingly uses non-standard fixings). Maplin has all this stuff, so it's not hard to get hold of if you need it.

It could, of course, also be a dodgy Freesat box. The first one I bought (Goodmans) was very flakey and was back at the shop for replacement within 48 hours. Can you borrow a box from a friend or neighbour for a few minutes? You would be able to tell very quickly whether it's your Freesat box or something about the existing installation that's at fault. Alternatively take the Freesat box to a friend's house and plug it in to their satellite cable.

I would say you need to firstly eliminate the Freesat box from your enquiries; after that, it's probably simpler all round to get a professional installer to check the set-up for you, unless you're happy to buy all the kit you need to test and replace each individual component one at a time (cables, connectors, LNB, dish alignment).