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If you have a mobile RV or Marine gyro controlled satellite, you may have noticed that as of yesterday, it won't lock on to 110w. You may also know from experience that KVH hold times for tech support are notoriously long, and they are most likely to tell you that you need to call a tech to come out and help you (at our own cost) anyway.

Well, if you're on the internet, you're probably intelligent enough to fix this yourself!

Your satellite has an *easly accessible* serial control port somewhere (mine's on the power panel), and you *should* have a cable for it (it came with the kit). You might have to purchase a serial-to-USB adapter cable (if you haven't at some point) if you don't have a serial port on your computer on your boat/RV, which you can find at Microcenter or Fry's, depending on which part of the country you live in. If those aren't near you, you'll have to order one.

Anyway, once you have that cable hooked into your satellite's serial port, you need to run a terminal program to talk to it.

Select the COM port of your satellite (trial and error if you haven't done this before - you've hit the right one when you start seeing stuff start scrolling by on the screen). Oh, and the satellite needs to be *on* for you to do this.

Once you're in, you're now free to update your satellite.

Type these commands, in this order (pausing between each command for the satellite to spit out it's stuff).

HALT (the satellite will stop).
DEBUGON
SATINSTALL,ECHO_110,ECHO_119
@DEBUGON
@SATCONFIG,A,52,12224,20000,78,0X1006,R,U,3
@SATCONFIG,A,52,12414,20000,78,0X1006,L,U,3
@SAVE,A
@DEBUGOFF
DEBUGOFF
ZAP

While you're in there, you may want to program in the 129 satellite that KVH says you can only get if you spend another $5000 on a new dish. They won't even give you the tracking codes for this one if you ask, so you have to program it as a user configured satellite.

To program a new satellite into the system:

HALT
SATCONFIG,USER1,129,W,3,C
SATINSTALL,ECHO_110,USER1
@DEBUGON
@SATCONFIG,b,98,12282,20000,56,0x1008,R,U,3
@SATCONFIG,b,98,12472,20000,56,0x1008,L,U,3
@SAVE,B
@DEBUGOFF
ZAP

While still connected, you can switch back and forth between the satellites by typing @L,A or @L,B . Make sure it finds the new 110, and if you've installed it, 129. *When its locked on 129*, there's an additional command to do (just once), because dish keeps updating stuff.

HALT
@DEBUGON
@SC,20000,56
(let it do its thing. When prompted, hit: )
@Y
@DEBUGOFF
ZAP

You're done. Put back your A/B switch if you've got it, or do a "SATINSTALL,ECHO_110,ECHO_119" again (if you don't want 129 on all the time).

Any time you want to switch that second satellite around, just go back in there and do:

SATINSTALL,(whatever),(whatever) and the two satellites in your A/B switch will be either 110 and 119 or 110 and 129. You MIGHT be able to do 119/129, but they're REALLY close to each other in the sky so it might have issues with the lock. Plus, why would you want to? If you're adding in 129 I'd assume its for HD, of which 119 doesn't have any and 110 does.

This still doesn't allow you to record things from both satellites at once, but it gives you more options.

Hope this helped someone!