I was thinking from the beginning: this man has a switch problem. I have had a couple disecq switches do that on me...
I smashed 'em with a maul. No more problems.
I'd check that switch, and the coax ends for that matter, before I did anything else.
Good luck finding it. :up
stogie, I'm a little disappointed (I like to smash things too
) to say that I'm pretty sure my one and only switch (Ecoda) in my setup had nothing to do with my problem.
In the multitude of variations that I experimented with I could tell no difference even when I pulled the switch out of the circuit.
Now your other thought (coax) is getting warmer, in fact I'd say
"give that man a cigar"!
I finally took my Visionsat/small tv combo out to the dish, hooked it up and proceeded to put it through it's paces through 6' of coax, instead of 100' of ribbon cable and a switch.
After about an hour of seeing same old stuff, I changed the LNBF out....no help. I finally kind of noticed a pattern that I was having more trouble with the sats fairly close to my true south, but it never was consistent in any way.
Turns out it was the coax that runs from the motor to the LNB, when the dish was skewed over east or west it would tend to make a connection, but when it was more straight up and down sometime the connection would drop out.......it was very intermittent.
I had wiggled that cable several times but I'm guessing I must have done it when the dish was skewed over and I just never got it to show.
Pretty sure this was caused by me having 2 zipties holding the coax to the support arm....and having those zipties too tight, they didn't allow the coax to have free movement. Rookie noob mistake.
*the above novel is totally moot if I find out it was something else, in which case I will probably smash something*