Struggles to lock signal

knickspree

Active SatelliteGuys Member
Original poster
Sep 14, 2010
16
0
Alaska
My satellite connection (and receiver) was working fine for about 10 days, but I got up the other day, watched tv during the morning, and went to the school, came back an hour later it and was struggling to get a signal and has been ever since. It will lock on to different transponders but not the original one I had it set up for. Like NFL Network will come in smoothly (for a while) but then when I go to a local channel or ESPN it struggles to get a signal from the satellite and will come in and out.

I did go outside and notice a power line was pretty close to my line (almost touching), I don't know if that would have anything to do with it, but it's been struggling to get a consistent signal since Sunday afternoon. I've ran almost every test or installation type of thing on the receiver, but haven't been able to fully fix the problem. It will lock onto a different transponder for a little bit, but on that transponder it struggles to pick up channels for a while.

The level has never been red, it's always been green and will get up to 80-90 signal strength but struggle to consistently lock onto satellite 119. I'm using a Dual SD DVR receiver in Alaska I bought but the satellite (300 Dish) I'm running off of is old and only 1 cable goes into it (from my receiver) so I typically get half the stations with my package. I'm also sharing the dish with another person, but he claims to have no problems the last couple days. But I haven't had a problem either picking up the stations I do get, until a couple days ago. Any idea what this problem might suddenly be?
 
LNB

Thanks for the responses. However, due to the fact I'm in a village in rural Alaska, things are a lot more difficult to configure. My tech guy has been busy for weeks and hasn't been able to stop by and look at it at all. I tried a new booster, didn't do anything. With a dual receiver it's worked fine when the signal was coming in consistently, I just had to go into the "Point Dish" screen and make sure it was on the correct input whenever I lost power or shut my satellite off.

I'm tryin to troubleshoot it on my own now since I don't know when my dish guy can come back out, but he mentioned it might have something to do with the LNB, and that by switching ports it might fix the problem. Could this possibly be it? Because I read similar article where person's tv would work for 30-45 minutes, and then cut basically out (sounded extremely similar to mine), and he said by working with the LNB and connections to the satellite it fixed it.
 
My distant networks

Also I just noticed that the even transponders seem to pick up the signal fairly consistent when compared the odd transponders. My locals and espn channels are all on odd transponders, and the friday before my satellite went out (about 2 days prior to my problems) I added on additional locals through my distant networks. Could this of been the eventual cause of my signal problems, because before I had them my satellite worked fine (however when I added them on and there wasn't an immediate loss of signal until 2 days after)?

And with my situation going through a multi-switch, would dropping these extra locals possibly fix my problem?
 
Fixed it

Ok, I found my problem. I discovered I was on a 4 output port switch, and that when all four outputs are being used the switch doesn't work properly. Once of the ports wasn't being used so I simply unscrewed it from the switch, and now my satellite comes in crystal clear, no problems.