About 10 minutes ago I was getting the usual channels with a low signal but now I am not getting anything. Anyone else getting anything on Galaxy 17.
Is it just me. Sometimes wierd things happen with my Merc II.
May not be related, but back when I was using a Mercury (before I got fed up and threw it in my junk pile), I kept having similar problems (which have also been reported by some other people), often the problem would manifest itself by signal levels going to zero in tuning menus, or when I'd be out trying to aim a dish, and the signal would go away completely. But eventually I started noticing it while viewing programs, where I'd be watching a strong signal, then it would just go away. Strange thing is that it would go away, but I could usually get the channel back by changing channels, then back again.
I thought that it was an issue with the tuner or something, but one day I was viewing a channel both on the Mercury AND on my Twinhan card which was slaved to the Mercury via the passthru. Well the channel went out on the Twinhan too.
Finally, I hooked up a signal meter with a voltmeter to the lnbf line from the Mercury, and found out that when on vertical polarity, that the Mercury would just randomly lose lnbf voltage. This never happened when on a horizontal transponder. So all the above issues seemed to be caused by no voltage going to the lnb. Confirmed that the receiver was still receiving by slaving the Mercury to another receiver, where reception would be solid.
Anyway, I think the circuitry in the Mercury which reduces the 18V to 13V for receiving vertical channels must be flakey. Works some times and not other times. I found that whenever the above happened, that if I switched to a horizontal channel and back to vertical, that voltage and signal would come back, but switching between vertical channels didn't correct the problem.
Anyway, I'd suspect that the Mercury was the problem, particularly since most of the transponders listed in Lyngsat on that sat are vertical.
