Satellite Input Error on DirecTV R10 DVR

[BCA]

I have had my R10 Tivo receiver for a few years and have had no issues with it until last night. We were watching live TV and the receiver just reset itself. After initializing it could not find a satellite signal on both tuners. The screen message says “Satellite Input Error”. I manually reset it by the remote and still nothing. Then I did it by the red button and still the same result.
I can still access everything that is recorded on the hard drive but cannot get a signal from either tuner on the satellite.

My non DVR receiver in the other room is working just fine.

Is there anything I can check on my own or is time to call it dead?

Thanks,
Brent

 

[jdspencer]

The first thing to do is check signal strengths, if possible, from all satellites. Also, check all connections from dish to the receiver including the ground block and any multiswitches that may be installed. Swap the input lines to the R10 and see what happens. What dish do you have?

 

[BCA]

Thanks for the quick reply. It's fixed and working again!

I was about to swap the lines when my wife said that the receiver in the other room was having trouble finding a satellite signal. We have been getting a lot of snow lately so I went out and cleaned off the dish and it immediately began working again.

I have been a DirecTV customer for about 10 years and I have experienced the "searching for satellite" message many times before due to heavy rain or the occasional snow blockage, but in all of those instances, there was always a degradation of the picture first and then the familiar black screen with the message.
In this case the R10 receiver was receiving 0% signal on both tuners and the picture went from being fine and then the receiver just reset itself out of the blue and would not finish initialization. All the while the other receiver was working normally.

I didn't expect the fix to be as simple as that but I guess I will chalk it up as a new lesson learned.

Thanks again.
Brent