New to Dish and have lost signal twice in the first two weeks

Just press the Guide, Menu or DVR button and you should be able to try other channels or watch recordings. And there's nothing wrong with modern Perfect Vision cable that's rated to 3Ghz. In fact it's got a solid copper center conductor while most Dish approved wire only has copper clad steel. Obviously the solid copper is better. :)

Speaking about cables, when I first had DISH service installed with the Hopper2000, the cable used is the VEXTRA V66, are those cables any good, any idea what kind of shieldling it is since according to this, it's not the quad shield version:
Vextra Technologies - RG6 Coax Cable - CCS Conductor
 
A related question, I live in Birmingham AL. about 200 miles north and 75 mile east of the Topic Starter. I am on the western arc. Why would he be on the EA and I on the Western when I am further east
 
A related question, I live in Birmingham AL. about 200 miles north and 75 mile east of the Topic Starter. I am on the western arc. Why would he be on the EA and I on the Western when I am further east
Many times the arc is decided by which sat has your locals. Sometimes it is line of sight.
 
My install was 3 weeks ago and I'm seeing similar signal numbers. We've had some rain come through, but nothing heavy. I haven't had an outage so far. My installer did reuse my Directv cables coming into the house. He ran new cable from the dish to the "splitter" or node (been a while since I've had dish so I can't remember the equipment names) that runs to my hopper 3 and my joey 2. All cables from that node onward are my old Directv cables. I did double check all connections after he left to make sure they were snug. His install was disappointing to be honest. Everything works OK, but I'd never do such a sloppy job with the dish mounting and cable runs. This is why I decided to check the connections later in the evening after he left. Hopefully your problems will be a simple loose connection.
I feel for you. I'm so anal about how my cabling looks, I visited my brother here during my trip back home and grabbed my tools to clean up his DTV install. It was a cabling disaster
 

Updgrade to Hopper 3 EA

Hopper 1s