Anyone know much about how DISH equipment works?

Yep. It is bad neglectful design to have a box be unprotected from shorting on a coax cable that runs out to an environment where it is commonly cut/stripped/trimmed/kinked/stepped-on/chewed-on, etc. Overvoltage from a lighting strik or something more severe? Sure, maybe. But self-shorting? Fuhgeddaboutit, the engineer should be demoted to the 9-volt battery tongue-testing QA division.

Fellow I knew related the story - he was helping his friend , they were in the garage when the dog in the back yard started barking, then the phone rang. Funny thing is, not long after - same thing. The dog barked then the phone rang. By the third time, he went out to see. The guy had put the dog’s chain in a loop over the telephone wire across the back yard so the dog could run back and forth. Over time the insulation wore off, every time the phone rang the dog got a 48V buzz to ground through his collar. His friend said…“If you ever tell anyone about that I’ll kill you.” But, he’s still alive.

The key test of “were you ripped off?” Did the repair guy leave you the dead components? I don’t know enough to say whether the situation could have fried those pieces. I could imagine a very convoluted short during a chew cycle, where the voltage is fed backwards into the components - voltage to ground and ground to voltage; that might do it.

Now that’s a great story!

Other people have covered electrical current on the coax cable. In my old setup there was a power supply that plugged into the wall that sent power over the coax cable up to the LNB.

The Netflix and DishAnywhere are going to depend on your DVR’s internet connection, not on it’s satellite connection. If the satellite connection is messed up, for whatever reason, then you should be able to still watch recorded shows. As long as your DVR has internet, then you should also be able to use the streaming services which stream to or from the DVR over the internet. Some streaming and on demand things may come over the satellite, but those are most likely limited to pay-per-view type programming, and would not work if the satellite signal was down.