does rain/snow really kill the reception

[Kevinw]

Actually the rain hitting the dish doesn't account for much if any signal loss. Rather it's the couple miles (diagonally, based on your dish's elevation angle) worth of rain in the atmosphere between your dish and the satellite. Together all those drops make a curtain that, in heavy rain, is thick enough to obscure basically all of the space beams from the satellites.

Why the difference in performance?At work we use a 6000 and at home a 811. Is the difference in newer technology?

 

[J3ff]

Im in CT, Ill pull up my old thread here about readouts. I have two dish500's on the roof.

 

[J3ff]

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for 119, 11/12 is 107/103
for 121, 11/12 is 94/91
for 61.5, i cant seem to find an 11, for 12 is 107

 

[hancox]

hmmmm - I live in CT too, and have very similar #'s. I've had rain fade exactly ONCE the year-ish I've had Dish. That was when Ivan's remnants came through 2 weekends ago. Other than that, not a blip on my Dish500.

 

[J3ff]

well dont forget im a Beta tester of the 522

wow yer real close to me actually Im in norwalk.

and whenever it rains hard, i def loose it.

However, I am ok with that, im just being honest with the original poster.

My fam is the people who cant deal with it. So now im on sat tv, and they have cable.

 

[S43R80]

well dont forget im a Beta tester of the 522

wow yer real close to me actually Im in norwalk.

and whenever it rains hard, i def loose it.

However, I am ok with that, im just being honest with the original poster.

My fam is the people who cant deal with it. So now im on sat tv, and they have cable.

This is discouraging . I live in CT as well (near Harftford), and after weighing some pros and cons, I actually went the Direct TV route (ordered 2 days ago); I'll let you guys know how Direct TV fares in the bad CT weather in a few weeks (I hoipe Jeff is wrong .

One thing though: A neighbor across the seat has a dish (not sure which brand) pointed straight through a couple large trees; does this mean that a couple trees are ok, as long as the signal doesn't have to penetrate through anything too thick?

Anyways, since my cable reception was sooooooooooooo bad, I think I can deal w/ a few blackouts every year; I just hope it doesn't become a weekly thing.

 

[video62]

It's part of the cable FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about rain causing a DBS system to cease working at the slightest sprinkle. As most have said here, a properly aligned dish goes a long way to preventing rainfade, but no satellite signal is immune if there's enough water in the air - even the "big dishes" at the cableco headend can conk out if the rain is heavy enough, though it's not likely.

I left my cableco back in 1996 due to its lousy outage history - it would go out for many hours at a time, not just a few minutes as happens with a big thunderstorm. The cableco seemed to want to say that cable outages were just "part of life"... like death and taxes.

My reliability has been far better with DBS than my cable ever was. Yet, some people are fortunate that their cable tv hardly ever goes out (maybe they live just blocks from the headend?), thus they would be the ones to say DBS has more outages.

YMMV (your mileage may vary).

 

[SimpleSimon]

... One thing though: A neighbor across the seat has a dish (not sure which brand) pointed straight through a couple large trees; does this mean that a couple trees are ok, as long as the signal doesn't have to penetrate through anything too thick? ...

No looking through trees is not OK. It's probably loking OVER the trees. The signal is actually coming from 20+ degrees higher than where the uninitiated think it's looking.