my Champaign IL locals down - how to diagnose?

[markav]

Fairly new Dish user here with a superdish/522 setup. I lost all my local channels last night and I'm looking for some basic guidance before I venture into customer service territory.

On the signal strength and check switch pages, how many satellites am I suppose to be getting a signal from? I've got locks from 110 and 119, but some googling says that our locals are on 105. So am I correct in assuming from that that I'm supposed to be getting signals from 3 satellites -- 105, 110, and 119?

When they went out last night, the first thing that happened was that when I selected a local channel in the guide, it would go to a "seeking satellite" (or whatever it says) screen. But after a little while, the locals wouldn't show up in the guide at all. Like they don't exist - not even a slot for their channel number. Does this indicate some sort of hardware failure?

Any guidance on things to check would be very much appreciated.

 

[TuxCoder]

I have the same setup and had the same symptoms all last week. Run the check switch test to sort of see what might be going on, and so the receiver can react accordingly to your current switch/LNB state. Press Menu-6-1-1 to get to "point dish" and select "check switch" on the right. First you might just note what it already knows, but then you should run the test again. With the problem I had, every time I ran the test I would get different results/errors pertaining to the 105 LNBF.

Now my question to others here:
Does the receiver ever do any check switch tests on its own, like along with the guide update and hard disk diagnostics? I had assumed it would just sort of "cache" the results from the last test you had run, and operate from that set.

 

[markav]

Tuxcoder - thanks for the reply. I've done check switch a few times and always get this same response for both satellite input 1 & 2:

port 1 - 119 ok
port 2 - X X
port 3 - 110 ok

My presumption is I'm supposed to be getting 105 on port 2, but I don't know enough about it to be sure.

So did yours end up clearing up by itself or do you still have the problem? I guess I'm going to have to call it in at this point, I'm getting the feeling I've either got a hardware problem or it's something wrong on their end.

 

[TuxCoder]

I had them send a guy out Saturday the 24th and he replaced the switch. But Tuesday the 20th I had swapped my 105 input with 119 and the problem followed the 105. So I'm not entirely convinced it was the switch.

Then of course I go to start watching TV later Saturday night around 10pm and have the same symptoms. After messing with the connections a little and a couple check switch tests, it was OK. Then shortly after that I discovered there was a brief uplink problem due to a bad storm causing other people to have problems as well, right at 10pm. So I'm not sure what exactly was going on.

Anyways, except for that incident, and occasional crummy reception in clear weather (~43/125) it seems to work fine since the guy was here. Today I'm going to look into tuning the dish better for 105 to increase the lousy 43. I'm getting 90 on 119 so I can maybe sacrifice a few points in favor of 105 if I'm good enough.

Another thing you might try is unplugging the power from the 522 for a few minutes. Also, while it's unpowered, remove the two satellite input lines going into the receiver. This might not be totally necessary since the 522 is unpowered anyways, but I figure it will knock the switch out for sure, to ensure a clean initialization (others here can correct me etc.). Then plug the input lines back in, and plug the power cord back in and run another check switch test.

 

[markav]

Thanks for the suggestions Tuxcoder. Just tried it with no luck, unfortunately. There are some on the other site's Dish forum in similar situations that think this problem could be a 522/2.01 software update issue. I posted this here because I thought it was a more general type of issue, but I guess it's worth seeing if any other 522'ers have similar issues.