HD Upgrade nightmare

[jcalton88]

Alright, I am posting to help a family member. I until recently had Direc-TV and never had any problem with signal because my yard has an excellent view of the sky(apr. 4 acres of clear land to look through) but his house is surrounded by trees. He just got a Slimline dish and a HR21 receiver. We installed everything and got signal on all transponders except 18 and 28, but no view of any other birds except standard...101 I believe it was. He has all channels except for HD channels aside from channels 70-79 which he does receive. After about an hour on the phone with customer service this is what happened...

First during troubleshooting they had reset all receivers, which didn't work.

Next they added programming, deactivated it, and added it again, which didn't work.

Tried switching the primary receiver to a different one then back, which didn't work and I later noticed they deactivated the other receiver and didn't reactivate it, so I was down one TV.

Told me I had the wrong dish and ordered another one(I found this out during a second call, he ordered it and charged my account without my knowledge)

So, after going through this and them telling me they couldn't come out for two weeks, I raised a little hell and got them to come out in a couple days. Waiting wouldn't have been bad except the whole reason my brother-in-law decided to upgrade was because a mild windstorm blew his entire dish off his roof.

The dish was installed less than a year ago and has been "fixed" by D* twice since.

I guess my question is, what can I do to fix this before the D* idiots come touch it again?

Oh, and I got the other receiver to work, well, I took the old one that was "deactivated" and switched it for the one that they should have left alone and low and behold, it wasn't deactivated. I asked the tech rep three times to make clear what receiver was being deactivated, he insisted it was the one I was telling him to.

 

[Zynergi]

My guess is to let the D* Idiots do their Job, since its quite clear you have no clue what your doing.. btw 99% of us are D* Idiots. From your extremely rude post I would say you dont have LOS, or didnt setup and peak the dish right. What part of NC are you in, maybe I can be the idiot that blows off the account or gets to charge you an actual installation charge do to the job right.

 

[mental1]

The 99 & 103 satellites are a lot harder to sight in that the 101, 110 & 119. I would say you don't know how to sight in/dither your dish and need an idiot like me, or another DirecTV idiot to come do the job your clearly incapable of doing.

 

[jcalton88]

Not the first

It is not the first dish I have set up, so I do know how to set it up. This is the first that hasn't worked right, which I could probably put down to the way the cables have been ran. And as for referring to idiots, I was mainly talking of the customer service reps on the phone, since they were the ones that left it in shambles and one eventually hung up on me although I was doing everything he asked. Maybe I should have made that a little more clear, as I did not want to upset anyone in the field.

But in my defense, did you neglect to read the part of the post where I stated the previous dish FELL OFF of the roof due to half-assed installation? And that it had been fixed twice by D*? Maybe not all of you are idiots that do sub-par work, but I know of atleast 3 in the field that do.

People like my brother-in-law have to depend on the guys sent out by these companies, and taking advantage of them in my book makes them worse than idiots. I have seen wires strung across the roof, and the last one that came to my house before I cancelled my service broke one of the vents for my crawlspace instead of drilling the mortar out and running the wires through that.

Is there any justification for that?

Sorry for the misunderstanding, as I have had one or two techs come out that did a good job and I was very pleased, but that seems to be a dying trend from what I've seen done recently. And don't worry about having to charge for the isntallation, we pay for the maintenance plan so we don't have to worry about all those charges from dishes falling of the roof.