Cabling under deck - losing signal ?

[Krishna]

Hello

I have a dish500 system with a legacy receiver and have used them for several years now. I recently moved to a new house. There was already a co-ax cable running from the yard to the living room passing under the deck and under the house. I was unable to receive any signal using that cable. So I thought the cable must be bad and and used another cable and ran it on the floor and had to keep the door open, but this cable worked fine and gave good receiption. One would think that the original cable was bad.

Now I took out that cable from under the house, connected it to the dish and receiver but above ground and this time it worked. Out of curiosity, I ran the second cable below ground and this time the cable that worked outside did not work when running it under the house.

This is driving me nuts. Is this a known problem ? I don't know if any of you has faced this problem. I appreciate any help regarding this. Please note that the dish is oriented correctly to 110 and 119 satellites.

Thanks in advance.

 

[mikew]

Are there any splitters in the run under the house? Are you using RG-6 Cable. How long is the run?

 

[Krishna]

thanks

Thanks for the reply. No, there are no splitters. A single coax cable (i think it is RG6) runs from the SW-21 all the way to the receiver. The cable is about 25ft long.

 

[Mike500]

If one of the stray shield wires contact the center conductor anywhere, you will not get a signal. Internal corrosion or internal breaks in either the shield or center conductor from stretching will run the cable. This usually starts at, but not always, at the "F" connectors.

 

[SimpleSimon]

The above is all good general troubleshooting, but re-read the post.

The commonality is "under ground/deck/house".

Two different cables work while above ground.

Anyway, sure sounds strange (and is a new one) to me!

 

[shadowwalker]

Sounds strangely similar to a trouble call that I was recently on. Customer had run about the same way as you describe but instead of a deck it was a above ground pool. Turn out the main feed from power company ran almost the same path to the house. The contractor for the power company only buried the line about a foot deep (don't know how that was missed in inspection). On top of that they were testing the new broadband over power line service. I read in some of my amateur radio magazines that that service causes problems with ham radio service. So we moved the line and service was restored. I could not be 100% positive if main power feed was the problem but one can only think.