The Solid Signal Blog

The other day I was mindlessly scrolling through reels and TikToks, as one does in 2024, and I came across a couple of them that seemed both interesting and a little weird. I won’t link them here because honestly I don’t want to give them the exposure. But if you are interested in antennas you have probably seen them too. The videos are basically the same. Someone solders a SIM card to a USB cord or to an RG6 cable and bingo, they get fantastic results. Sometimes it’s not a SIM card. Sometimes, it’s just the charge cord itself or some other random piece of gear. No matter what, the end result of these videos is amazing reception of hundreds of channels, just by doing this: There’s only one problem. It doesn’t really work. Or, I...

Power banks. They solve a problem that we never used to have. A generation ago, cell phones weren’t that important. A decade ago, a charger that was less than one inch on each side was all we need to keep going. Today it seems like a power bank is a must-have if you’re traveling. I know people who keep them in the car for emergencies. They fill an important need today: more power. If your phone is your best connection to the rest of the world, and it doesn’t even last a day on a charge, you need something to help you keep it charged easily. Why have a power bank? Truth is, you know the answer to this question. We love our phones. We love being connected. Try to go a day without touching yours, I bet you can’t. We panic when we leave...

Sometimes, something changes and you don’t even realize it. I’ll admit that this is one of those times. Here’s the quick answer: If you get an HS17 Genie 2 from Solid Signal, you will probably not be able to connect an external hard drive. There was an inline change to the manufacture of the Genie 2 and in the process, they removed the eSATA port. Let’s dig a little deeper. eSATA and external hard drives for DIRECTV DIRECTV’s first HD DVR, the HR20, had a 500GB hard drive. That was enough for about 100 hours of HD depending on whether it was recorded from the satellite or over the air. That’s a lot of capacity, but it’s not unlimited. Keep in mind this was 2006, and USB hard drives were not very fast. Instead of using USB for...

As home theater fans, we’re pretty much conditioned to want the best quality. But, as installers, we have to realize what’s possible and what’s not possible. Here’s a case that I dealt with a few weeks ago: One of our installer partners was upgrading the satellite system on a boat. Pretty much everything went well except there were a few TVs that gave this message: On other TVs, the screen would look fine for a few seconds and then go black. They called us at Signal Connect and we had the answer for them: this is generally caused by inferior quality HDMI cables or by older TVs that don’t support the latest content protection. You see, all HD programs on DIRECTV have some sort of copy protection on them so that you can’t just make...

What you see above is a top view of DIRECTV’s AIM meter. It’s a great tool for working with DIRECTV dishes, and in fact it’s the only tool I recommend. Why? Because it’s the only meter that reads every kind of DIRECTV signal. It also has a guided mode which can help even the greenest novice get the dish perfectly aimed. However, there have been some folks over the years who say that they can’t get any results from their meters. Generally this boils down to two issues: either the meter isn’t set for the correct dish type, or you’re connecting to the wrong port. I’ll go through both issues in this article, which should let you get moving quickly. IRD or ODU? The simple answer is that, the line to the dish should always connect to...

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If you have kids in the house, try telling them this horror story. At that point your kids will just roll their eyes at you, but that’s how we all grew up, right? Caller ID didn’t even hit our lives until the 2000s. Before that you just had to take your chances. Could we be heading back to that point? It seems ridiculous. The case for landline phones A landline phone isn’t a terribly useful thing by today’s standards. You can’t go online with it, and you can’t even take it outside the house, except maybe a few feet if it’s cordless. But we don’t talk too much about the benefits of landline phones, and there still are some. A landline phone is usually more reliable Cell towers have batteries in them that can keep them going for...

Believe it or not — and you probably believe it — I get questions like this all the time. In real life people actually walk up to me and just ask them. Sure, they’re people I already know. I know I’m not some sort of real-life celebrity. So let’s get down to business. Carrier-to-noise ratio Carrier-to-noise ratio, or CNR, is the proportion of how much “raw signal” you have vs. how much noise. This measurement is very easy to get, all you have to do is find a carrier wave and then measure its strength. You can also measure the strength of adjacent frequencies to get the noise level without the carrier wave, although modern meters can measure both on the same frequency. CNR is important because it gives you a raw measurement of how...

In a recent article at Inside the Magic, Disney’s Bob Iger was quoted speaking candidly about Disney+. In a CNBC interview, Iger said, Disney in general has had a fairly rough half decade. The company obviously lost a lot on its theme park business in the beginning of the ’20s and while that’s bounced back, other segments of the business clearly haven’t. ABC has very few bona fide hits on its broadcast schedule. ESPN seems increasingly marginalized due to competition from dedicated sports apps and regional sports networks. Disney’s movie divisions seem incapable of creating a hit. And then, there’s Disney+. Now, this is far from the first time I’ve complained about Disney+. The first was when it was announced back in 2017. I was...

This winter, DIRECTV’s Signal Saver has really come in handy. But it’s not for everyone. SignalSaver is a technology that automatically switches to streaming when there’s a problem with the satellite signal. This doesn’t happen very often, but in the case of severe rain or snow, it can happen. Most signal problems fix themselves quickly, but in the case of an outage lasting more than a minute, it’s nice to have the option to keep watching without switching to another device. How SignalSaver works In the case of a signal outage, you’ll see one of two screens. If you have a standard receiver you’ll see a message on screen that looks like this: Genie clients and Geminis that are totally disconnected will see the same message...

See if this sounds familiar. You’ve left your boat alone all winter, and you’re getting ready to go out on your first big trip. You turn on your satellite TV system, and you get this message: If you have a KVH HD7 (not the newer UHD7) there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that basic steps like rebooting everything isn’t going to fix the problem. The good news is that there is a fix, and you don’t have to completely upgrade your system even though you have an older satellite system. All you need to do is follow these steps. Step 1: If you have Starlink, turn the Starlink system off, turn the HD7 off and on again, and test to see if the problem is still there. Starlink signals can interfere with satellite TV reception...

Chances are if you’re reading this article, you’re looking at an upgrade to some fairly old DISH equipment. The ViP series of receivers from DISH were made from the mid-2000s until the late 2010s. There’s still stock of the ViP222 out there, because it’s a reliable receiver that just plain works. But, it’s not the latest and greatest device out there in the world of receivers (in other words, non-DVRs.) That title belongs to the Wally, a slick little receiver that takes the great stuff from the 222 series and builds on it. Here’s what you get if you get a Wally: With a Wally, you get the Hopper user interface and the Hopper Voice Remote. That means your internet-connected receiver can use the power of Google to control your TV...

WARNING: This article may cause irritation or agitation of the forehead due to hitting it or rubbing it with your palm. We live in an age of AI. We’re rapidly getting to the point where it will be impossible to believe anything you see, even on video. We’ve been through this before with still images, when Photoshop became common in the 1990s. The world didn’t end then, and at least I hope that the rise in deepfake technology will not cause the world to end now. If we can all believe that things will be ok, it gives us the ability to lean back and laugh at some of the ways the technology is being used. Like, for example, this YouTuber YouTuber “There I Ruined It” has been using AI voice generation and the latest generation of audio...

It seems like a silly question, but it’s a good one. In fact until about five years ago it wasn’t technically legal. It wasn’t technically illegal either but there was enough confusion that some companies felt they couldn’t wait. Good news though, and I’ll put it in big letters: Cellular Signal Boosters are legal for business use. The problem comes back to the rules that were published back in 2014, and that means we have to talk a little history. Back in the old days, cellular signal boosters were sort of the “bad boys” of the cell world. Officially, none of the major carriers supported them and they even told you that the use of cellular signal boosters would void your phone’s warranty and even open you up to criminal charges. The...

Here’s the good news: If you have a DISH Wally, you can connect a hard drive to it and turn it into a DVR. The process is automatic – all you do is connect it via USB and plug it into a power source and it “just works.” Yes, there’s an extra fee for DVR service on your account but when you call us at 888-233-7563 we’ll help you with that quickly. Here’s the bad news: DISH doesn’t sell the hard drives. They’ll tell you the requirements: It has to support USB 2.0, connect via USB-A, and be powered from a wall outlet. (Here’s more information on that.) They also say the capacity has to be under 1 terabyte, but there a plenty of sources to tell you that it’s ok if it’s up to 4TB. So what can you do? I’m happy to say that Solid Signal...