So seems to be the news leaking out - people all across the US have lost Dish Network signals - my receivers keep bouncing between “complete signal loss” and “partial signal loss.”
Their website is being slammed and all of their phone numbers are busy. Has anyone here managed to find out anything definitive? For such a national outage, I can only surmise that their headend and/or uplink station have suffered a catastrophe such as a fire or some other physical mayhem.
That’s surprising. I have Dish Network, and it’s working just fine for me. If service was out for me at all, it was between about an hour ago, when I turned off the TV, and now, (twenty minutes after your post) when I turned it back on to check after reading this. I’m in the northwest Chicago suburbs.
Just out of curiosity, from someone who has never paid for TV service in his life, does this mean you can’t watch ANY TV at all, or just not the programming from Dish Network.
In other words, can you still watch the various free channels that are broadcast to everyone, or are your televisions totally kaput till Dish Network gets things back up again?
SD channels are working for me. And some HD. Most HD are ‘complete signal loss’.
Depends on where you are located and what kind of TV set-up you have. I am locate in the Nevada desert and I cannot get anything except Dish or Direct. There isn’t even a cable here. This was not always the case. There were once relay stations on the mountains and persons got all their TV OTA then Dish and Direct put them out of business. Before moving here I was in Alaska where there was nothing except cable.
TV over the internet seems to be getting better.
Yeah, as others have said, it’s working fine for me, but then I don’t have any HD channels. The regular channels seem to be working fine, and I know that if you have the HD channels you also get the regular ones as well (my folks have the HD service from Dish), so just switch to those until this is cleared up.
-XT
We have no OTA antennas here - all TV, including the locals, come to us by Dish.
I’ve seen reports now from multiple sources that the satellite at 119 is down. This bird apparently carries most of the national HD channels. There is, at least, a workaround until they fix it. (That will be a hell of a service call!)
Go into the setup menu to point dish / signal, and run a switch test. It should run a few minutes and come back saying you don’t have as many satellites as before. OK that. (It two rounds of “Are you sure?” on my box.) You’ll then be run through an Acquiring Signal cycle and download of the program guide. All told, this will take 10-15 minutes.
Now, you should be able to see the non-HD versions of your usual channels. I can’t promise local channels will be back, since they use multiple satellites. Mine are back, FWIW. Be sure to change your Guide display to My Channels, All Sub, or something similarly basic - if your favorites display was trimmed out to just HD channels, there will be a lot of blank spots.
When they eventually have this fixed, you’ll most likely have to do another switch test to re-add the satellite. My understanding is that Dish Network has some spares parked up there, so it may well be an entirely different satellite.
Well, that explains it.
I stopped over at a friend’s house after work, and his TV was working/complete signal loss/working/pixilated/working/complete signal loss, etc.
Annoying.
Thanks for the info gotpasswords. Now at least we can watch some channels. Hopefully they get this fixed soon.
It’s the 129 satellite that is out. SD is fine, 129 carries most of the HD channels and some locals.
I hadn’t watched SD in years. I’d forgotten just how awful it looks! Hope they get 129 up soon.
They’re working on something that will hopefully have HD service restored tomorrow.
This workaround should trigger the same sort of reset and signal acquisition as my long method in a previous post, but I know from experience it does not work on my 722 HD PVR receiver. The long, tedious method is guaranteed to work. 
Good to hear at least that there appears to be an earth-bound fix that doesn’t involve waiting many months for a new satellite to be built and launched.
Interestingly, when I went to the channel guide, all of the problematic HD channels were already gone. Dunno if the 622 did it automatically when it lost 129, or if they managed to push something down somehow.
Called my mom and she’s blissfully unaware of any Dish problems. She’s never bothered with HD. I don’t think her Dish Network receiver even picks up those channels.
Relieved to hear the problem only affects HD channels.
It depends on your setup.
Some satellite setups come with an Over-the-Air (OTA) antenna that clips to the satellite dish. You can then tell your tuner to look at the satellite dish or the OTA. This assumes you have a tuner capable of this switch. The tuner may be part of your TV or separate and connected.
If you have that you will get local stations off the OTA if the satellite network goes.
What programming you can get OTA depends where you live.
Depending on your TV you might be able to run to Radio Shack and get some rabbit ears that could work too.
I honestly do not know why anyone opts for DISH over DirecTV myself but to each their own.
I just got back from the Get-Go down the street and their Dish Network is down. I spent a dull moment watching the Dish logo dance across their screen while I waited on my breakfast sandwiches.
Bri2k