I’m a DirecTV customer. Have been for years. I also have Satelite service for internet off the same dish. That’s now Hughs.net.
Anybody been having problems?
My TV signal goes down for about an hour or two in the middle of a nice bright sunny day, and then just comes back. I don’t loose internet capabilities during this time.
I know that the TV and the internet are two different satellites. It’s not that my dish has become misaligned (two separate receivers on the same dish).
Anyway, I have emailed them twice asking what’s up and have not received a response. I am dreading the hours long phone call to tech support. It’s a totally intermittent problem that I can’t pin down. It has nothing to do with the weather
Anyway, I think they might be having problems with the satellite, and before I call, I was just wondering if anyone else was experiencing the same problem. Or not. I would like to know either way.
Once, a while back, during an incredibly heavy downpour (of which there have been a dozen or two since we signed up with DirecTV a couple of years ago, the picture actually skipped a little bit for about half a second during a lightning flash.
Other than that, we have had not one noticable glitch in service the whole time we’ve been subscribing. Certainly nothing recently. Something may be wrong on your receiving end.
Thanks. Same here. The weather has to be pretty bad to loose the signal.
I suspect the receiver might be the problem then. I have had to replace it before.
I’m going to shut it down, do the unplug reboot and give that a try. Again.
This is my second receiver. The first one was not protected in an entertainment center or anything, and got a bunch of dog and cat hair in it. I used to take that first one apart and vacuum it. And it would then work fine. Don’t think that’s the deal with this one. It’s been kept quite clean and isolated.
No queerness in our DirectTv satelite signal in the last week or so. I have had intermittent apparrent failures in the past that wnet away with a hard re-boot of the box.
You’re talking about a phenomenon known as “sun transit.”
Sun transit occurs twice a year, when the sun crosses the earth’s equatorial plane during the spring and fall equinoxes. At these times, the sun aligns directly behind satellites for a few minutes each day. When a satellite is directly between the sun and a receiving satellite dish on earth, the enormous natural radio frequency noise from the sun can overpower the desired signal from the satellite. This results in a brief service disruption.
The disruption may take the form of noise, fading, or interruptions to any long distance, data and television services whose signals are carried via satellite.
The exact time of the sun transit disruption depends on the location of the satellite being affected and of the earth station receiving the signals.
I have been a DirecTV customer for years and have no problems. The picture has been very steady with no outages at all (except for very rare heavy rain).
It sounds to me like your multiswitch is going bad. Do you suffer this outage on all your receivers? If your multiswitch has an open port, move your cable to another port and see if that helps. Make sure that all connections from the LNB to the receiver are tight. The slightest thing can cause a loss of signal.
An excellent website for discussing this sort of thing is DBSTalk hosted by AVSForum. I have found all sorts of help, support, and entertaining conversation there.
I install satellite dishes for a living - only been doing it since May…
but Rico has the answer you’re looking for. I didn’t know the technical name for it, but I’ve experienced it, and my co-worker buddy explained what causes it, and it’s exacly what Rico described.
I install satellite dishes for a living - only been doing it since May…
but Rico has the answer you’re looking for. I didn’t know the technical name for it, but I’ve experienced it, and my co-worker buddy explained what causes it, and it’s exactly what Rico described.
Ok. Rico The down lasts about an hour, or two. It’s not a brief interruption. And it’s not noise or fading. It’s dead. No signal at all. Dead as a doornail.
Would the sun do that? And shouldn’t this always happen during the same time during the day? It had in the past hit in the afternoon. Today, we went down for about 3 hours this morning.
Soooo…. As we rotate around the sun……our axis does not change…. and as we spin…winter comes. Hmmmmm. It goes down in the morning now.
Or perhaps we get some reflection off the atmosphere that bungs things up. Geosynchronous orbit and all that. It never goes out when the sun is down. The Sat is always over my head.
Also interesting is that now, night, the system is purring along just fine. It’s never gone out at night.
I called DTV today, talked to 3 different people, got disconnected twice after going through the phone tree, had a nice chat with some girl in India (yes, it is plugged in) and they are sending me a new receiver.
We will see, but I must say, that I wondered why I was loosing signals on such a bright sunny Colorado Day. Hmmmm. I live at 11,200 feet. Could it be that the lack of atmosphere over my head has something to do with this?
Just a thought.
Thanks Rico, and all. I had a feeling that it may have something to do with the sun or something, but I could not put my finger on it. Equinoxe, Geosynchronous satellite, that’s probably it. We will see.
I had the same problem a couple years ago and after much fruitless searching and time spent on the phone and various boards, undertook the issue myself. Finally turned out to be the LNB on the end of the arm on the dish itself. With a new dish, the problem went away.
Since it only happened in the hottest part of the day, I surmise that there was a loose connection in there somewhere that would relax and break the signal.
Yeah, I think I’m going to chalk this up to ‘it could be anything’. We’ll see how the new receiver does, and I’ll keep track of when it goes down. But it’s not like I know it’s down when I’m not here.
Early morning now. Sun is still down. System is up. I’m going to leave the TV on and see if it goes down at the same time it did yesterday.
>And it’s not noise or fading. It’s dead. No signal at all. Dead as a doornail.
How do you tell the difference with a digital signal? Does the signal meter in the dish pointing facility report low numbers?
In a digital system with various kinds of error checking, a noisy radio signal and a missing one both probably produce the same “no information” screen-of-death on your TV.
DTVs receiver on my end has utility functions that can tell you how strong the signal is. It usually runs about 80%. It’s 0% now.
Now, just after 10 am I lost the signal again. Same time as yesterday. The sun is a good 40-50 degrees off to the left of where the dish is pointing. So the sun is not between me and the satellite. It must be some weird atmospheric thing.
I’ll be home all day and will keep my eye on it. It came back on last afternoon/night but I’m not sure what time as I was out.
I’m a bit bummed that DTV does not recognize this problem. Though I know that most of their techs are just reading a script.
Since it does not seem to be an issue with other DTV subscribers, I have to guess that it may have something to do with my location. And the one thing that stands out about where I live, is that I am a very high altitude. Perhaps extra atmosphere alleviates this problem for others. Some sort of weird bounce from the radio waves from the sun during (or near) the equinoxe.
That sounds kinda strange, I should get better reception, but I’m just looking for the anomalies that would affect me and no one else.
My system just came back up. The sun is about a half hour to setting over the ridge of a 14,000 foot peak about 2 miles from our house. No direct sunlight on the dish anymore.
It seems that at least during this time of year, if there is any direct sunlight on the dish, from any angle, dawn till dusk, our system goes down.
Perhaps it is something to do with heat as bear mentioned. But from my experience, it is usually cold that causes this type of failure (used to work in a TV repair shop many years ago).
Assuming you are not on a yearly contract with the buggers, there is a better fix. Switch!
Between the problems they were unable/unwilling to help me with, and the fact they wanted to charge me $300 for a DVR they were giving to new subscribers, I switched to Dish. Not only got new equipment installed for free, but a DVR and several months of cheap programming.
I may just switch back and forth every couple years to keep them on their feet!
do you have a friend or neighbor who has a DTV receiver that you could hook up to your dish? if yours gives an SS of 0%, and his gives a good SS, then it’s the receiver. If his gives 0% too, it’s either the LNB or interverence.
if the same friend or neighbor can lend you the LNB off his dish, you can troubleshoot that, too.
usually, when it’s an interference problem, though, the SS will be about 5-10%, indicating the receiver can “see” the LNB.
I’m sorry that I can’t be more helpful than this, though… like I said, I haven’t been doing this very long yet…
if you try this, though, take note of what angle the LNB is skewed to, on both your dish, and your friend’s… and make sure you set it back to the same skew…
Thanks for the advice, Overall, I’ve been very happy with DTV. It’s just the recent problems.
I did call them on Saturday, they are sending a new receiver to me for just shipping costs.
So, since I’ll be getting a new receiver, I’m not going to seek out a neighbor for testing.
It’s very curious to me that it seems to go down from about 10am to 6pm. Same time, every day. I’m home today and will keep my eye on it. Then, if the new receiver does not work, I’ll escalate.
Thanks, if anyone cares, I’ll keep this thread up to date.
