Today was my appointment for my dish alignment issue. Intertech is the company that handles installations and repairs in my area, just FYI. The appointment time-slot was the afternoon, between 12 & 5pm. I received three phone calls today, one in the morning to remind me of the appointment, another around 1 PM to tell me that they would be arriving between 4-4:30. The third call was to tell me that the tech would be there soon, as I hung up the phone, a van pulled up.
I discussed the issue with the tech, Tim, who was very nice. I describe the issue with the signal loss during cloud cover and during light rain. He looked at the signal strength on the receiver and seemed happy with the ~75 on TP 19 reading for 119, and the ~68 for TP 21 for 110, but noted the ~51 for TP12 on 61.5 was low. He walked to my backyard to check the alignment for the 110/119 dish and hooked up a strength meter and said it was aligned as good as could be. He then removed the DPP Twin and said something about 'drift' and replaced it with a "beefer" model. He then checked the grounding block connections and replaced the grounding block with a new one and re-grounded and zip-tied them to my fence so rain would stay off of them. Compression connectors for the four sat. lines coming from the 110/119 in my backyard were replaced and he showed me the old connectors, which were corroded quite badly. After running a check switch on the vip722, he looked at the signal strength and the 110 TP 21 was ~83, the 119 TP 19 was ~80. A huge improvement.
The 61.5 dish is on the side of my house, approximately 65 feet away from the 110/119 dish. He placed a ladder on the house to reach the dish and re-aligned it with a meter and checked it on the vip722. The signal strength went from ~51 on TP12 to ~78. Tim, the tech, said the dish was incorrectly hooked up and that was the reason for the rain issue.
Anyway, things seem much better and I am hoping for some rain to tell for sure. I was very impressed with Tim's attention to detail. He looked at every possible reason for the signal loss issue and fixed what needed to be fixed. I wasn't charged anything for the visit and I am very happy with his work.
Just wanted to give an update on the situation. If I didn't give enough details, please let me know. Thanks..................