Argh! The Dish Network dish has been installed at this house since 2001 and has never been a problem. I've had all kinds of idiocy with the receivers, but no problems with the dish itself. Until now.
Every single day, without fail, I lose about half of my channels during daylight hours. It starts around 9 AM, gets worse (more channels drop) as the sun gets higher in the sky, and around 5:30 they start coming back. At night, I get all the channels without fail. In fact, it took me a while to figure out that there was a pattern to this because I usually only watch at night, and I noticed that Tivo was regularly taping 30 or 60 minutes of the "acquiring signal" screen, and I didn't notice that the pattern was that it was always during daylight hours.
I live in San Jose, CA, where it's sunny every day in the summer, and has generally been warm with a few very hot (95F+) days.
I'm not home during the day very often so I haven't done an day-to-day analysis of whether it's always the same channels that drop out, and whether it always happens at the same time. I do know, from watching TV on weekend afternoons, that the channels that drop are often different -- usually the premium channels don't fail but they did last week, so that's my anecdotal evidence that it's not always exactly the same channels.
I hate intermittent problems!
I have no technical background whatsoever, so my ideas are automatically crackpot. But I'm thinking that it can't be the way that the dish is pointed because it's pointed fine at night, right? And if it were pointed wrong, I'd never get signals at all? So maybe it's some kind of heat buildup problem and the hotter it gets, the more the equipment fails? And then when it cools off, it works fine, so if I never watched TV during the day (or if Tivo never recorded during the day), I'd never even know there was a problem.
Does that make sense? Are there any electronic parts of the satellite dish that would fail in heat and function again when cooler? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Regardless of my crackpot theory, what are my next steps to figure this out and more importantly, to get this fixed??? (I actually just worked out my "heat problem" theory while writing this post, and if there's ANY POSSIBILITY that there's something to it, I can probably get them to foot the bill for coming out and fixing it, if only because DirecTV will be happy to come out and give me a perfect satellite dish for free.)
Thanks in advance for any light you can shed. I haven't bothered calling Dish Network yet because my experience with getting them to fix things is that they can only help me if I have fully identified the problem as well as the desired solution. Their troubleshooting skills leave something to be desired.
Regards,
Elissa K.
Every single day, without fail, I lose about half of my channels during daylight hours. It starts around 9 AM, gets worse (more channels drop) as the sun gets higher in the sky, and around 5:30 they start coming back. At night, I get all the channels without fail. In fact, it took me a while to figure out that there was a pattern to this because I usually only watch at night, and I noticed that Tivo was regularly taping 30 or 60 minutes of the "acquiring signal" screen, and I didn't notice that the pattern was that it was always during daylight hours.
I live in San Jose, CA, where it's sunny every day in the summer, and has generally been warm with a few very hot (95F+) days.
I'm not home during the day very often so I haven't done an day-to-day analysis of whether it's always the same channels that drop out, and whether it always happens at the same time. I do know, from watching TV on weekend afternoons, that the channels that drop are often different -- usually the premium channels don't fail but they did last week, so that's my anecdotal evidence that it's not always exactly the same channels.
I hate intermittent problems!
I have no technical background whatsoever, so my ideas are automatically crackpot. But I'm thinking that it can't be the way that the dish is pointed because it's pointed fine at night, right? And if it were pointed wrong, I'd never get signals at all? So maybe it's some kind of heat buildup problem and the hotter it gets, the more the equipment fails? And then when it cools off, it works fine, so if I never watched TV during the day (or if Tivo never recorded during the day), I'd never even know there was a problem.
Does that make sense? Are there any electronic parts of the satellite dish that would fail in heat and function again when cooler? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Regardless of my crackpot theory, what are my next steps to figure this out and more importantly, to get this fixed??? (I actually just worked out my "heat problem" theory while writing this post, and if there's ANY POSSIBILITY that there's something to it, I can probably get them to foot the bill for coming out and fixing it, if only because DirecTV will be happy to come out and give me a perfect satellite dish for free.)
Thanks in advance for any light you can shed. I haven't bothered calling Dish Network yet because my experience with getting them to fix things is that they can only help me if I have fully identified the problem as well as the desired solution. Their troubleshooting skills leave something to be desired.
Regards,
Elissa K.
