Satellite and storms

[JWKessler]

I don't know if this works for the little dishes, but back in the C-Band days you could press on the dish to deflect it just a bit one way or the other (typically just up or down for the big dishes since you could use the motor to drive the dish back and forth) to see how it effected the signal strength. If you found a spot where pressing the dish would increase the signal strength you knew you needed to repeak the dish. If every place you deflect the dish causes the signal strength to drop, you were pretty much on the money. I haven't tried this with my Dish installation but it seems to be springy enough for that to work.

It helps a lot to be able to see the signal strength yourself as you perform this little dance.

 

[whatchel1]

still true

I don't know if this works for the little dishes, but back in the C-Band days you could press on the dish to deflect it just a bit one way or the other (typically just up or down for the big dishes since you could use the motor to drive the dish back and forth) to see how it effected the signal strength. If you found a spot where pressing the dish would increase the signal strength you knew you needed to repeak the dish. If every place you deflect the dish causes the signal strength to drop, you were pretty much on the money. I haven't tried this with my Dish installation but it seems to be springy enough for that to work.

It helps a lot to be able to see the signal strength yourself as you perform this little dance.

That's still pretty much true.

 

[JEFFinINDY]

And here we go again. Storm just started, and as soon as it did, down goes Dish.

Honestly, if this is what I have to look forward to, I might as well go back to cable. Yeah, I won't have as many channels or anything, but at least I'll be able to watch what I'm paying for.

Edit: I'm also interested in jadiff's question - what should the signal levels be? At least one of mine is in the 50's.

Well, we had a storm 5 hours ago. Dish was down for 10 minutes, but the cable is still out and there's no telling how long it will take to get fixed. 12 hours? 3 days?

 

[JWKessler]

Well, we had a storm 5 hours ago. Dish was down for 10 minutes, but the cable is still out and there's no telling how long it will take to get fixed. 12 hours? 3 days?

I'd have to agree with that assessment. I switched to Dish after putting up with unreliable cable service for years. Not only were outages a problem but even when the system was up the video would break up and audio drop out a few times every hour. I got tired of yelling at my TV.

I found out that a power failure anywhere along the cable line from the head end would kill the repeaters in that area, killing my service. As a result, the cable would go out in the middle of a nice sunny day for no apparent reason.

Also every time there was a storm of some type anyplace the cable company served, the DVR would uncontrollably switch over to the Weather Channel and the weather service took over the audio. This happened several times while I was watching actual local weather alerts from a local station, taking away useful information and replacing it with a tire ad and some reports of storms hundreds of miles away.

Dish has been wonderfully reliable by comparison with very few outages here in upstate New York.