Youre talking about satellite eclipse or 'sun outage' which happens for a week on either side of the equinoxes in march and september. A lot of people associate them with sunspots but thats not what causes it. The sun is directly lined up with the satellite transmitters and ground stations, and the signal gets swamped by the electromagnetic noise for a few minutes at a time.
And rkr is correct they only happen in the middle of the day side. In these cases the channel remains active, directv just cancels video and puts up a slide explaining the outage. This would still be recorded.
An actual solar storm/CME can affect satellites on the crest of the day/night side. At 9 pm they are not behind the earth yet. However if that were the case one of two things wouldve happened.. Either you will lose your signal completely and the error would say "The program did not record because the satellite signal was lost" , or if it was one of directvs feeds that got hit the channel would remain but you would lose video. They might put up a "technical difficulties" slide and the dvr would record that without kicking an error. Ive never seen a channel removed from the lineup for solar reasons.
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