Over the past couple of months, we've been seeing sporadic disconnections with DirecTV. I called them, had a guy come out and he replaced our cabling between the satellite dish and my receiver, and everything started working fine. That was about a month ago. Last week, I started to see the same problems again - receiver would report unable to receive satellite feed. Then an hour or so later, all was fine again. We live in Phoenix, and its starting to get hot here again, so my thoughts were that he didn't replace everything needed and as things are heating up on the roof, connections are expanding and contracting, and hence we have problems.
So up on the roof I went. I'm a software engineer by trade, so learning about this stuff and dealing with it isn't scary to me. But I'm still a noob when it comes to satellite reception. I realize that calling DirecTV is going to cost me an arm & a leg now that my 'free service call' has been used up. So I'd like to fix this myself, so I can address it in the future if needed.
I have an old SAT-T60 Series 1 Tivo unit, and I don't want to lose that. Its been hacked to death, and has worked flawlessly for about 10 yrs, so I want to stay with it. I don't need HD channels, etc.
Up on my roof its a satellite dish graveyard. Seems that none of the old dishes are ever removed. The one that is currently in use is a Slimeline dish with 5 LNB and a built in 4 way multiport on it. Two of those cables are in use (we only have one DirecTV receiver in the house). All the cables a new going to it, and I checked them for shorts with a multimeter and it all looks solid.
There is also an International dish up there (for when I ordered some international programming years ago, and they sent me a 2nd receiver for that, but we cancelled that and sent the receiver back a while ago, but they left the dish & LNB for it up there). There is also an older 18" style DirecTV dish up there, with what appears to be a dual LNB on it as well.
When I use the Messages & Setup -> Satellite setup thing on my receiver, it seems to be getting great signal strength on the majority of transponders. Some are not there, but from researching this I understand that not all are used anyway. But when its not working, I try to download channels and it never works. However I noticed something strange. When I disconnect the coax cables between the dish and my cable runs, it often magically just starts working again. I had it working for about 6 hours yesterday after doing this, but before I went to sleep last night I tested it again, and both satellite inputs were getting no signal. Its been like that all morning today as well.
My gut feeling tells me the LNB is shot. When it works, it works great. The dish has never been moved and the signal strength is in the high 90s on the tester when it works. But when it doesn't, there's nothing there. Periodically it pops up with a signal, but not long enough to complete setup. So basically I'm offline unless I get the ladder out, go up to the roof, disconnect cables there and I have a 50% chance of it all coming back online. For a short period of time anyway.
So in attempting to debug this, I think I've narrowed it down to the LNB, so I ordered a replacement unit today. Will take about a week to get here. In the meantime, I'm wondering if any of the other dishes I have on the roof would work in the short term? Like I said, I only need SD programming, and I have two inputs, but I'd settle for one just to get some TV flowing again. I think that the 18" dish up there has dual LNB anyway, but what I'm not sure is whether it will work with any changes DirecTV might have done over the years.
From explaining this, has anyone got any comments on what I could check that I might be overlooking, and can anyone tell me if the older dishes will still work with my setup, keeping in mind my receiver is old and I want to keep using that anyway?
Thanks in advance for any comments or help.
K
So up on the roof I went. I'm a software engineer by trade, so learning about this stuff and dealing with it isn't scary to me. But I'm still a noob when it comes to satellite reception. I realize that calling DirecTV is going to cost me an arm & a leg now that my 'free service call' has been used up. So I'd like to fix this myself, so I can address it in the future if needed.
I have an old SAT-T60 Series 1 Tivo unit, and I don't want to lose that. Its been hacked to death, and has worked flawlessly for about 10 yrs, so I want to stay with it. I don't need HD channels, etc.
Up on my roof its a satellite dish graveyard. Seems that none of the old dishes are ever removed. The one that is currently in use is a Slimeline dish with 5 LNB and a built in 4 way multiport on it. Two of those cables are in use (we only have one DirecTV receiver in the house). All the cables a new going to it, and I checked them for shorts with a multimeter and it all looks solid.
There is also an International dish up there (for when I ordered some international programming years ago, and they sent me a 2nd receiver for that, but we cancelled that and sent the receiver back a while ago, but they left the dish & LNB for it up there). There is also an older 18" style DirecTV dish up there, with what appears to be a dual LNB on it as well.
When I use the Messages & Setup -> Satellite setup thing on my receiver, it seems to be getting great signal strength on the majority of transponders. Some are not there, but from researching this I understand that not all are used anyway. But when its not working, I try to download channels and it never works. However I noticed something strange. When I disconnect the coax cables between the dish and my cable runs, it often magically just starts working again. I had it working for about 6 hours yesterday after doing this, but before I went to sleep last night I tested it again, and both satellite inputs were getting no signal. Its been like that all morning today as well.
My gut feeling tells me the LNB is shot. When it works, it works great. The dish has never been moved and the signal strength is in the high 90s on the tester when it works. But when it doesn't, there's nothing there. Periodically it pops up with a signal, but not long enough to complete setup. So basically I'm offline unless I get the ladder out, go up to the roof, disconnect cables there and I have a 50% chance of it all coming back online. For a short period of time anyway.
So in attempting to debug this, I think I've narrowed it down to the LNB, so I ordered a replacement unit today. Will take about a week to get here. In the meantime, I'm wondering if any of the other dishes I have on the roof would work in the short term? Like I said, I only need SD programming, and I have two inputs, but I'd settle for one just to get some TV flowing again. I think that the 18" dish up there has dual LNB anyway, but what I'm not sure is whether it will work with any changes DirecTV might have done over the years.
From explaining this, has anyone got any comments on what I could check that I might be overlooking, and can anyone tell me if the older dishes will still work with my setup, keeping in mind my receiver is old and I want to keep using that anyway?
Thanks in advance for any comments or help.
K
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