Please help. Keep losing 119.

[cooper]

Hello all,

This is my problem. I have a Dish 500 set-up, 110, 119, 61.5. Frequently over the last couple of weeks in all types of weather (clear and calm to snow and wind) I have been losing signal on 119 and only 119. I've done a check switch and it comes back OK. Tonight it's a little windy but nothing major and 119 keeps going out for a few seconds at a time, comes back, then goes out again. I've checked the signal strength and it consistantly reads 115-120, even tonite. Could it be a hardware problem (bad LNB?)? I'm not in the business though I have learned a lot from this site. Please help.

Thanks in advance for any responses,
Coop

 

[Stargazer]

What kind of signal strength do you have on 119? Do you have two dual lnbf's with an sw-21 switch or a built in twin lnbf?

 

[cooper]

I think I have twin dual lnbf's. All six lines from the three sats go into an SW64 switch with four receivers attached. Signal strength is usually around 115.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

You probably have a cable that has a crack or a connected which has water in it.

I would replace the cables from 119 to the sw64 and I am willing to bet that would fix the problem.

 

[cooper]

Spoke to a CSR this morning. Through a process of elimination we figured out that the 1B port on my SW64 is bad. Should get a new one within two days. Thank goodness for the extended warrentee program I should up and running by the weekend with no cost and more importantly no ladders as my back yard is currently a sheet of ice. Anyway, thanks for the help.

Coop

 

[Shichonni]

I had inadventent signal loss problems Sunday (1/18/04) and the satellite kept going through it's switch test and the picture would come back. Couldn't figure out why I kept losing the satellite signal, so I experienced it also

--shich

 

[TheaterWizard]

You probably have a cable that has a crack or a connected which has water in it.

I would replace the cables from 119 to the sw64 and I am willing to bet that would fix the problem.

I'm willing to bet you are still right on this one, I see bad cables all the time on 64's that are mounted outside without using watertight connections, and wraping the crimp. Most of the time the center conductor will break right off when touched. The cables that NDSC uses, or even the ones that used to come with dishes are hex crimps(not water tight) not compression.

 

[cooper]

Swapped out the 64 on friday. So far so good. The switch is mounted inside the house and there are no connections other than to the sats themselves exposed to the weather. In the spring we're having the house resided, new roof, leaders, gutters, etc. so I'll check the wires then anyway just to make sure.

After the job is done I plan on snaking the wires up through the leaders and gutters to the sats (wires enter the house in the foundation, sats are on the roof). Anyone see any problems with this?