Sporadic Transponder 27 Problems

[B_Nye]

Hi,
I've had DirecTV (HDTV, oval dish, Hughes Platinum HD box) for over two years. About a week ago, I started having problems on channel 360 and 269 - both are transponder 27 channels on the 101 (A) satellite. The picture freezes or is distorted. This only occurs for about an hour or so a day, and at different times (sometimes afternoon, other times late at night). There's another TV in the house (non-HD, but uses the same dish) that is not having this problem. Transponder 27 levels go from mid-80's strength for most of the day, then I get strength between 0-35 during the "bad" periods. The folks at direcTV that have helped troubleshoot the problem believe the Hughes box is going bad, but can't explain why reception is so good 95% of the time. It just happened again this evening. The picture went bad (and transponder 27 level went from 85 to 0-29) for about 30 minutes. It then suddenly went back to perfect working order, and the transponder level went back up to 85. I've disconnected and reconnected everything, soft-booted the box, and powered it down and back up multiple times, but this doesn't seem to do anything. Testing it on the other TV doesn't seem to help since it will work fine, but then works the same when hooked back up to the original HDTV. The signal just suddenly gets good again all by itself.

I've looked for threads about transponder 27, which I did find one (similar but not exact), but that one doesn't have an answer yet.

Does anyone have any ideas or can someone direct me to a thread that might discuss this problem?

Thanks.

 

[DJMIKEY]

This may not be the answer you are looking for but I will tell you of a problem I have/had and what was causing it. I have HD in 2 rooms and I was always having a problem with just 1 room and it was at different times but mostly at night, the problem was with my locals and HD programming, it seemed that my signal would go from the 90's to 0's and I would have cross channel mixing, for instance I could see Discovery Ch on my local channel, after talking with everyone at Direct and going thru 4 service calls 1 guy finally told me he had only seen a problem like mine once and he said it was a power/grounding problem, that got me to thinking if I was pulling too much juice at these times when I was having the trouble so I started to monitor anything that was on when I was having my problem, I finally figured it out the other night, my halogen floor lamp was causing the trouble, when I had the light on dim it killed the signal for my local and HD, turned the lamp off and my signal came right back. Sorry this is so long but maybe it will help you or someone else out with similar problems.

 

[B_Nye]

Grounding I suppose could be a problem. I've been out of the room when the problem has occurred (or even when it got better) so I don't think it's a light or anything like that. I did adjust the A/C so it would switch on to see what happened. I did see a slight temporary fluctuation in the transponder level when the A/C kicked on, but nothing that would impact the picture. I've gone about 48 hours now without the problem. Perhaps it fixed itself, or Directv did something they didn't tell me about.