Installation trouble - Newbie question

[avideditor]

Hello,

I just searched the web and found this forum and hope you guys can answer a question about my install yesterday. Any help would be appreciated.

I went from basic cable to Directv HD (what a jump) and had an HD dish and two HD receivers installed. Or at least they tried. Here is the problem I'm having.

The dish and one receiver installed fine. The other could not show a signal from the dish. I think the line is fine as it carried the basic cable signal before, but the tech could not get the receiver to see a signal when he moved the line to the dish's signal. He thinks there is a problem with the line but I don't understand how if cable tv worked fine. He says I'm going to need to fish a new line through the walls.

thanks,
-Richard

 

[jdspencer]

Check for corrosion on the connectors for that cable. If there is some, it could interfere with the switching signal that the receiver sends to the dish LNB for selecting the polarity.

 

[boba]

Did the installer check for voltage from the receiver? There could be a splitter between the receiver and dish.

 

[lou_do]

To test the line, swap receivers and see if the one that is working now, works on the other line. That will tell you if it is the receiver or the line.

 

[avideditor]

Thank you all for your replies.

jdspencer - I don't suspect any corrosion as the house was recently remodeled and the lines to all the rooms are new. I will check the connectors to see if they were installed correctly.

boba - The line from the dish to the receiver was straight through without a splitter, just a barrel connector. He did check the line to that room and said the voltage was high. What does that mean?

lou_do - I should have made this more clear, the good receiver was originally in the room with the 'bad' line and the defective one was in another room. The good receiver is the one that showed no signal. It works fine in the other room.

thanks,
-Richard

 

[Spize]

believe it or not a bad receiver can work and cause a good one to not work. This is very rare though.

Another thing... the line can be bad for satellite and work for cable. It is actually very common for a wire to work on cable but not satellite. Satellite lines pass higher frequencies and pass more voltage. (stick you tongue on a satellite line attached to a good box and it will feel like when you stick a 9v battery to your tongue, standard cable TV lines in most cases won't).

Also, most remodeling and building contractors do not use very good wire(usually it is cheap cheap rg6 or rg-59, or else the go overkill and put in quad shield rg6 which is good wire). Most housing contractors are also piss poor at putting fittings on the ends of the wire, especially if they use the screw on kind. Another thing common on bulding contractor wire installs is staples through the line itself, which will ground the center conductor to the braid. They either use the wrong type of staples, or rush it because it isn't what they do to make their money.

Most cases where you have searching for satellite is caused by wire or connectors, bad boxes are generally rare and a usually caused by D.O.A. bonew boxes that are just bad to begin with and never work) or by power surges/lightning. Although the boxes made in the middle-late 90s tend to jsut get old and die, anything newer than 2000 does not usually just get old and die.

 

[syi]

bad ground

I have experienced all the sugested problems using existing coax. I would like to add a bad ground to the list. I had 1 install were the customers home was not grounded properly. When I installed the 2nd receiver it would not work. Spent a long time trouble shooting this. Short story I unhooked the ground wire from utility ground and both boxes started working.

I sugested that the customer call his electrician right away. It turnout that he had a hot ground.