Dish Network diagnostics

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Patrick M
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Joined: Sun Apr 06, 2003 6:33 pm
Location: LukPac Land

Dish Network diagnostics

Postby Patrick M » Fri May 02, 2003 4:54 pm

On the last day of the NBA regular season (April 16)...a night when the playoff seeds were being finalized, NBA League Pass decided to stop working. I was in a hurry, so I called Dish Network, and they walked me through the onscreen diagnostics (satellite strength & check switch). Turns out I was getting satellite 119, but not 110. She told me either the LNBF was bad or the dish was out of alignment. Sending a Dish Network dude out costs, I believe $90-ish an hour. Or maybe it's $90 per service call. Anyway, it was expensive.

Missing the Spurs/Mavs game, despair set in. Although Duncan didn't play that night, and it didn't turn out to be much of a game after all.

I stopped by the local yokel satellite place to see if they could help with the diagnostics. They basically said over and over, "We can't tell much without sending a technician out." and kept telling me how it could be a grounding problem, a loose connection, blah blah blah. Cost of service call: $45. When I first went in this place to buy a dish, one of the guys opened up a drawer in desk and spit his chaw in it. I declied the service call. They told me a new twin LNBF would run $80 new, but they would sell me a used one for $50. Afterwards, I found someone on ebay willing to sell a used one for $25, new for $50.

I poked around the Echostar newsgroups, and got really confused. Apparently on a Dish 500 with twin LNBF, the switch is built into the LNBF, and each half of the dish is responsible for receiving one of the satellites.

I didn't want to buy a LNBF if I didn't need to, and I didn't want to screw with the alignment and risk making something worse, and I didn't want a service call. I climbed a small ladder and for shits and giggles took the LNBF and "Y" yoke off and swapped the cables around. We have two receivers, thus two coax connections, and in this configuration each coax receives both satellites. No changes from playing the wires, and nothing obviously wrong with the LNBF.

Then I looked at things from the dish's perspective, and realized there was a largish tree about 20 feet away. Hmmmmm. The dish had been here since August '01, but we never had a problem during '01. But then we didn't have any PPV during '01 either. The tree could have leaved out, and blocked just enough signal a few weeks ago to keep me from getting those PPV channels that only satellite 110 had. It was worth a shot.

With some assistance from my brother in law and father, we started cutting out the 'likely' branches today. Voila, we get satellite 110 now, and we get around 110 signal strength for both satellites (very good).

The dish in question:

Image

The tree in question, post surgery:

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The tree rem-nants:

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The moral of the story: if you have a satellite reception problem, never overlook the obvious. :P