I have decided that I hate my local Cable TV provider and I’m contemplating getting DirectTV. However, I understand that bad weather can disrupt the satellite signal. Anyone have any idea how bad the weather has to be before said disruption occurs and how long it usually lasts? I live in New York and it can stay overcast for days at a time. Will I come to hate DirectTV even more than I hate Time Warner Cable?
Probably not…
Weather has to be either really havey rain on lots of water to dispupt satellite signal.
We will lose signal when we get one of those real good rainstorms where you can’t see the other side of the street, and when lots of snow melts on the balconies above us and it drips down landing on my dish. (Sometimes if my dish itself freezes with ice, but that’s very rare).
Other than that, it’s a go!
try Googling ‘rain fade’.
PS: I should qualify my above post with the information that I have just finished a bottle of Southern COmfort, and am having a hard time typing correctly…sorry 'bout that!
I currently have Dish Network. I used to live on the Oregon Coast where the sun was only a fleeting memory. Dense clouds, high winds, heavy rain and thick fog were what we called “nice days”.
Only one in a while did we have interuptions. This was normally due to high winds pushing the dish. Sometimes with really heavy rain we’d see flickers, but nothing that lasted too long.
I’ve been a happy user for years. I am all for people ditching cable for sat tv.
Ditto – I only have DirecTV problems with super, super deluges of rain. Maybe a couple of times per year, and usually only for the duration of the really heavy stuff.
If you get a DirecTivo (or a free-standing Tivo), then you won’t miss TV during storms – there’ll always be something recorded and waiting for you!
I have had my Direct TV system for about two years now and I have had only three signal interruptions.
Once was for about 10-15 seconds during a bad thunderstorm.
Another was just last week. The signal got progressively more scrambled for about a minute and then was lost for a couple of minutes. Strangely, it hadn’t yet started raining, but the thunderclouds were ominous. The severe weather obviously was high enough in the atmosphere to interrupt the signal even before the deluge hit my house.
The first interruption I had was the worst. It was the morning after a wet, heavy snowfall. Turned out the snow had accumulated in the dish. I had to clear out the snow before I could receive the signal.
So, my GQ factual answer is “based on my experience, the outages are few in number and short in length.”
My MPSIMS answer is “satellite TV quality is wonderful.” (But remember, your local channels do not yet arrive in High Definition. A fact that I didn’t understand when I bought the system. I wouldn’t do it any differently mind you, but one should be informed about the drawbacks as well as the advantages.)
After 2+ years of having Dish Network service I just went back to cable last week. Only this time I went with the new digital cable. WOW. What a difference. The clarity os so much better than the compressed signals of the Dish Network signal that I hadn’t even noticed how bad the dish was until we changed.
Now, having said that I will clarify that my dish signal strength was only moderatly good due to a single evergreen tree that was nearly in line with the sattelite we needed. So my signal strength wavered between 75 and 80 and 75 is the minimum for good reception. So we experienced frequent tearing and reippling of the video/audio during rain storms (Seattle area). Once digital cable and cable internet became available in my area last week, we jumped at the change and we’re very pleased.
One other thing…the folks at the Dish Network are like used car salesmen. They called me 4 times trying to get me to stay on with them, interviewing me over and over and over again and continually offering me better and better deals to stick with them. Unfortunately they pissed me off when the first “offer” included a $95 service charge to have them come out and install a new and improved dish that was guaranteed to give me 90 or better signal strength. How could they do that with an evergreen in the way?
Anyway, I’m very pleased with the new digital cable picture quality.
DTV is great. I also have Direcway internet. I really have no choice since all I can get over the land line is 9600.
Anyway, I have had very little trouble with weather interupting the signal. I live in the rockies, occasionally, a heavy snow storm will make it flicker. But, If you do get a LOT of snow, make sure the dish is accessible so that you can brush the snow off the dish itself. Again, not much of a worry for most folks, I get a lot of snow and only have to brush it off a couple times a year. Wind and sun seems to take care of the rest of it.
I do quite well with my Dish, which is bolted to a nice clear spot on the chimney. There is nothing above it. It has gone out once, for a grand total of five minutes, in the middle of a 18" snowstorm. That’s about it.
I’ve had DirectTV for maybe 8-9 months and we had one interruption when a hurricane (Isidore, I think) came through the northeast last year. Other than that it’s been fine.
Programming-wise I don’t think there’s much difference between dish and digital cable.
Pay attention to your bill because they’ll leave promotional stuff on once the promo expires and charge you for it.
I’ve got a DISH Network dish, and it’s gone out a few times in the two years that I’ve had it. I live in the south, so we don’t have snow issues, but really heavy rain will knock it out. I may have an intermittent signal sometime this evening as Tropical Storm Bill moves through. Regular rain or overcast skies aren’t a problem, though.
DirecTV, in fact, is currently running an ad featuring Danny Devito calling “bullshit” on the signal quality issue, and I agree. Line of sight is important, so no trees or hills should be in the way of the dish, but once you have a clear line of sight it takes a major act of god to fuck with your signal. Contrast that to cable, where one bad connection/slice in the cable anywhere along the network can cause you reception problems.
-lv
I’ve had both, even worked for 11 years for TWC as a contractor. Both share some characteristics… their customer service departments all suck; always have, probably always will. Picture quality is not that different. I’m sticking with DishNetwork as TWC has turned the Warner cartoon characters into advertising whores to promote cable. TWC can go straight to hell.:mad:
cedric45, how do you really feel. (grin)
To expand a bit on my personal experience. I mentioned that I’m very happy with the Direct TV signal quality. I should also mention that I have a good friend in my neighborhood who has Time Warner digital cable. As we’ve attempted to compare picture quality (difficult to do unless the displays are side by side), we both are of the opinion that the satellite image is of a higher quality than the cable image. In other words, this example (albeit an isolated one) supports LordVor’s opinion.
You work for the cable company? 
All kidding aside, you simply had a marginal setup, so it’s no wonder you lost the picture when a neighbor sneezed. What Dish was going to sell you is a 30" or so dish - a bigger dish to snag more signal. Of course, what you should have done was simply move the dish away from the tree.
FWIW, digital cable in my part of San Francisco is a joke. DAILY outages of an hour or more, and a picture so blocky and full of low-bitrate artifacts it looked like it was made of Legos drove me to dish. TCI/Viacom/AT&T/Comcast (Pick one - they change names ever two years) might have improved it since then, but I have no plans of going back, especially since the dish service is cheaper by about five bucks a month and infinitely better quality and reliability.
And those ads from the cable company about how awful dish is because it needs special equipment. Well…so does digital cable. And with dish, you can only get one channel at a time. Hmm… Sounds like digital cable. Unless you buy a digital cable decoder for each TV, you’ll only get absolute basic channels - the local channels and little else.
Thank you all for your input. I feel much more comfortable considering DirecTV now.
TWC needs some serious competition! That’s the only thing that will straighten them out. When you’re the only game in town, you can be a SOB with little effect to your bottom line.
After I “let my Brooklyn out,” they did swap out my defective box (it died on a new installation after 3 days of service) in two days rather than the two weeks (!!!) they originally wanted me to wait, so my blood pressure has returned to normal.
However, any further problems from them and I won’t hesitate to switch to Dish or DirecTV. I have a clear view to the south so it shouldn’t be a problem.