Are sun outages a thing of the past?

[MikeD-C05]

A week ago on Friday my parents called and said their Wally was losing signal every few minutes. I went and checked that day and there were 80 signal losses. I called DISH and ordered a replacement receiver because everything else looked good in the diagnostics. I even had the tech remote check the diagnostics from her end and she said it didn't make sense to lose signal that much. Well went home and by this Friday when I went over there to do the replacement receiver my Mom said that they hadn't lose signal at all since that day. The signal losses showed only 81 so they had one more after I left last week and it stopped. I tried to activate the replacement receiver and it wouldn't update the software to the latest , it was stuck at U421 and had the Hbo screen saver. No second ota tuner was there. I called the tech again and we went through everything and tried stuff on his side remotely and finally I told him that we might as well put the old box back on the account and I would send the replacement receiver back to DISH. So that is what we did. I wonder if sun spots were responsible for the signal losses? My account only had around 50 signal losses, but I have the hopper. So we both had a large amount of signal losses for that same day.

 

[primestar31]

A week ago on Friday my parents called and said their Wally was losing signal every few minutes. I went and checked that day and there were 80 signal losses. I called DISH and ordered a replacement receiver because everything else looked good in the diagnostics. I even had the tech remote check the diagnostics from her end and she said it didn't make sense to lose signal that much. Well went home and by this Friday when I went over there to do the replacement receiver my Mom said that they hadn't lose signal at all since that day. The signal losses showed only 81 so they had one more after I left last week and it stopped. I tried to activate the replacement receiver and it wouldn't update the software to the latest , it was stuck at U421 and had the Hbo screen saver. No second ota tuner was there. I called the tech again and we went through everything and tried stuff on his side remotely and finally I told him that we might as well put the old box back on the account and I would send the replacement receiver back to DISH. So that is what we did. I wonder if sun spots were responsible for the signal losses? My account only had around 50 signal losses, but I have the hopper. So we both had a large amount of signal losses for that same day.

Sun outages for a particular satellite usually only last about 15~ minutes or so at maximum. That's only during the window of time when the Sun is right "behind" the satellite you are pointing at right then.

 

[NYDutch]

Mike, anyone flying kites in the area??? A few years ago, we were seeing intermittent signal dropouts one afternoon in a campground. It was near solar outage time, but the dropouts didn't act like that. Then I went outside to check on the dish, and lookee there, a teenager was flying a large kite right in front of our dish! I explained what was happening, and he readily agreed to move far enough away to eliminate the interference.

 

[MikeD-C05]

Mike, anyone flying kites in the area??? A few years ago, we were seeing intermittent signal dropouts one afternoon in a campground. It was near solar outage time, but the dropouts didn't act like that. Then I went outside to check on the dish, and lookee there, a teenager was flying a large kite right in front of our dish! I explained what was happening, and he readily agreed to move far enough away to eliminate the interference.

Not that I know of ,but my parents are in between two, 2 story houses and where the dish is it looks right at the neighbors house and away from the huge tree in their back yard that blocked the old western arc dish in the spring and summers. They get great signals in the 60s and some 70s on both sats. They get higher signal then I do at my house 11 miles away that I had DISH come out and peak the dish. I installed my parents dish myself. The only thing I noticed that I still can't figure out is that the installation diagnostics screen shows dpp lnb with separator. We haven't used the separator since we had the 722k. We do have a diplexer on the line that splits the sat coax into both sat and ota from the clip on antenna on the satellite dish. Just weird that it still shows this on the install unless it recognizes the diplexer as a separator.