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Thought I'd share my long ordeal and what I finaly found to be the problem.

Short cut: My wireless router was preventing my Joeys from staying connected to the the Hopper even though they were not connected via wifi and bridging was off.

It started slowly with the inability to watch the DVR from one Hopper on the the other Hopper. Then the Joeys would occasionally go into search mode and but would reconnect to their respective Hopper. Then they would not be able to find their original Hopper but would connect to the other Hopper in the house. Then the Joeys would freeze and then not connect at all.

Reboots sometimes helped, sometimes not.

I called Dish and their great customer service troubled shot but nothing helped so they scheduled a tech for the following morning. The tech said he had been having issues with the "older" model Hopper (Hopper 2000), which I had, but said that all he would be able to do was replace them with another Hopper 2000 and that his shop no longer store them. He did replace both Joeys. His suggestion was that I call Dish and get upgraded to the Hopper with Sling. (Sidebar, I have no use for Hopper with Sling because my puny internet service would never have fast enough upload to be able to enjoy remote viewing). Dish wanted me to do the standard sign a new 24 month agreement to get the new H w/Sling and I refused to do so out of principle. So after talking to a supervisor they decided to send the tech back out for more trouble shooting.

The same tech came back out and equally frustrated said he was going to upgrade both Hoppers. After initially getting the run around by Dish, he found the right agent and we got the new Hopper w/Slings authorized with no 24 month commitment and all seemed fine. Until shortly after he left when the Joey started failing to connect. As per the tech's instructions I called him directly. He spoke with his boss and they suggested I remove the ground wire from the node, which I did. Didn't seem to help.

So I got on to this forum and read where some folks were having issues with the Hopper's interfering with their wifi network and although none of our devices (ipads, laptops, phones, etc) seemed to be having any issues staying connected to the wifi, I figured that if the Hopper network could interfere with the wifi it could do the same the other way. So I unplugged my wifi router and presto, Joeys connected and stayed connected for several hours without a problem. Plug the router back in, Joeys disconnected. Even after several reboots of both the router and the Hopper/Joeys.

I was using a Netgear WGT624 108Mbps router that is about 3 or 4 years old. A quick trip to wally world and I bought a brand new Netgear R6250 with duel band. Plugged the thing in, set up the Hoppers to connect to the internet and all is well. Has been running all day without any connectivity issues.

I don't pretend to know why the old router was causing issues but at least they are fixed and the wife is happy.

I hope this helps someone else.