Losing almost all channels other than locals at night

[Fraust]

I have a dishnetwork 500 dish, and dvr reciever. Everynight I lose all of my upper channels until sometime in the morning. I see a gradual loss of picture over about a 1-1 and a half hour period, then I get a total signal loss, on everything but my local channels. they come in fine. The satalite guy came out today and replaced the coax cable that runs from the dish to the reciever. He couldn't trouble shoot the problem because the dish works fine during the day.

I have gone outside and looked to see if anything changes around the dish at the time it goes out, and I have looked down the road. There is a clear los to the sky, if anything there would have been leaves in the way during the summer, but now they are all gone.

About the only thing I can think of is, it has just started to get cold here, in the low 30's at night. I have mentioned this to the tech guys 3 times on the phone, and to the sat guy today, but noone thinks it could be a problem. Thanks for any info, I am missing mythbusters as I write this

 

[TNGTony]

Could it be an icing problem on the LNB? Also remember that the signal comes from 22 degrees above where the satellite dish appears to point. Be sure there isn't some sort of obstruction there like icicles.
Little or no chance this will help, but... What is your signal like when you can see the channels? If it is just marginal signal level then the channel loss could be attributed to satellite wobble. A geostationary satellite actually appears to make little circles in the sky as it wobbles slightly. If you have a marginal sat lock, there is a possibility the sat's natural slight movement could be enough to have you lose most channels for a set period of time every day. The reason the locals would still come in is because they could be on a spot beam which has a much higher signal level to your area. Or it is on another satellite.
Again, this is highly unlikely, but just a thought.
See ya
Tony

 

[Anole]

Which satellites do you receive during the day?
By looking across a number of the transponders (disregard any spotbeams), what is the typical signal level on each bird?

 

[kayaker123]

I am having a similar problem in that I am losing satellite 119 during a good part of the day. Sometimes I get lucky and get 119 coming in nice and strong according to the signal strength. I do not believe it is a matter of just making sure the dish is aligned. I read somewhere else in this forum that the type of connector that the installer used can affect the voltage running through the system. I also wonder if there could be the possibility of ice crystals in the lnb. My temperatures here have been getting up to the low 30's and have been down to -20's at night in the past few weeks. I am stumped on this problem and hope that the installers can help with the issue on Friday. I see this problem on all 3 of my receivers and it seems like this issue just exacerbates the problems I have on my 921 receiver.

 

[Van]

Its a possibility that both of you have a temp sensitive lnbf or you may have a channel master lnbf that reacts in a similiar fashion due to poor production standards and or poor quality parts that were used at the time of production. Either way to the first poster I would suggest calling back to dish and tell them that you suspect that the lnbf is suffering from temperature sensitivity. The way to tell is if your loosing your signal as soon as the sun pretty much sets and then you get it back not to long after the sun comes up.

There is one other possibility that is a bit remote and that is the mount location may be flexing from thermal reaction to heating and then cooling and is changing the position of the dish assembly enough that your loosing your signal though this is a rather remote possibility.

 

[sksatellite]

Yes, this is considering bad LNBF when its cold or its hot, the LNBF will loss signal, most of these are bad components in the lnbf.

 

[Fraust]

I'll check the signal strenghts out in a bit. There are no icicles here though, it's just cold, I live in Nc, nights are 25 days are in the 50's. It is 12:10 now, andal of my locals are messed up along with almost every other channel. I have been able to get hbo to come in fine, but it is very hard to try to cycle through the channels with it trying to aquire signal.

 

[BrettTRay]

I remember those Channel Master DP twins that were so temp. sensitive. We were told to swap them out on every service call we went to. You could recognize them very quickly because they had a big hump of plastic poking out where the little tag is that says the part number as some other stuff.

 

[Fraust]

thanks guys, the problem was the lnbf

 

[Van]

Those channel master lnbfs would go out if a nat farted on them, but I did come across a few while doing dishpro plus upgrades that worked fine.

Glad to hear that you have solved the problem Fraust.

 

[kayaker123]

I just had the installer come out today to inspect my system. She replaced the switch and things worked good....for a few hours. I called Dish up tonight and found out that the next available time to come out would be Jan 16th. Dish said it was probably a grounding issue I'm tending to think it is my LNB. Either way, this sucks.