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My daughter wanted to get DirecTV because of the introductory offer at $29.95. She called in and the installer came out and everything seemed fine. After 3 weeks she began to lose signal so she called the DirecTV and they sent out a different tech who said the problem was the first installer put in the wrong LNB set and changed it out and left. She still had the problem so she called me to come over and look at it. I told her I'd have a look for the obvious but I'm not that familiar with the latest DirecTV dish hardware.

What I found was at first two things obvious-

The dish was pointed directly into a tree about 10 FT in front of the the line of sight angle to the sky. When my son-in-law came home he told me that when he spoke to the second installer he told him he'd have to get his neighbor to cut the tree down. ( That obviously is not going to happen )

The second obvious issue I saw is the first installer mounted the in ground pole for the dish directly in front of the electrical meter. The dish is 4 inches in front of the meter. I believe this is in violation of the Code. It actually makes it difficult for the meter reader to see the readings. But I suppose he would have to complain before DirecTV would do anything about that. Secondly, the installer pulled the meter ground wire off the meter and used it to ground the feed through strap for the coax. Now their meter is not grounded! This may be a safety issue.

Another minor issue was that they got HDTV and the installer connected the sat receiver to the HD monitor with coax. I told them they need to get the receiver connected to the TV with an HDMI cable. The TV has 4 HDMI inputs. We are already using one for the Blue Ray Player.

Finally, it looks like they got used equipment (see photo) especially the dish looks to be several years old but I guess DirecTV sends out used equipment for new installs under that special price. The coax looks new.

While the signal looked pretty good, when the wind isn't blowing, they get 92 average meter readings and good picture. When the wind blows the tree the signal varies all the way down to zero and they get the searching for satellite popup every couple seconds. The signal meters swing like a vu meter on audio it is so bad.


If this was my house, I would simply move the satellite mounting mast 10 ft down the wall and and add some extension coax. Put the ground wire back on the meter box and add a 10 ft ground rod for the strap. add a second ground rod for the dish mast. Shouldn't take more than an hour plus time for the concrete to set up.