The 129 sat was replaced this year or late last year and it is all new and very powerful in signal strengths. The 61.5 sat is older from old Echostar sat and the defunct Voom company. I wasn't aware that St.Louis was on 61.5 as well but I guess DISH is trying to cover all dish configurations in order to cover line of sight issues.
My point is that if your hd locals are coming off of either 129 , 61.5 or 118 sats , you should eliminate the redundant satellites. IF you have hd receivers and hd programming , then eliminate either 61.5 or 129 or in your case both 129 and 118 sats so there is no conflicts with the ota timers. This to me is the cause of all the ota timer problems. In DISH's zeal to cover all different line of sight issues and all possible sat configurations , they didn't know that having multiple sats for hd locals would cause ota timer problems.
My name based recording features were gone on my ota timers when I had both 61.5 and 129 hooked up together for my locals, that could be had off of either 61.5 or 129 sats. Funny this doesn't affect the national sat channels in hd that can be had from either 129 or 61.5 sats. The name based recording still works on them regardless.
I think this is the solution to all the ota timers disappearing or not working. So lets see what configurations we have with DISH.
eastern arc 1000.4 sat dish -77/72.7/61.5.
western arc 1000.2 sat dish -119/110/129.
internationals 500plus/1000plus - 118-119 can be paired with 129.
dish 500 + side sat dish - 119/110 + 61.5 or 129 side sat dish.
IF you don't mix the different arc sats or combine redundant sats that have your locals or on all three sats, 129 or 118 or 61.5 like St.Louis does, you should have no more problems with your ota timers. It seems to me that DISH should eliminate the locals off of 118 since this adds a triple threat. This is why DISH says they don't support different configurations where they are mixed up. I have called and tech support always says they don't recommend or support mixing or duplicating the HD national channels using both 129 and 61.5.
I only hope that DISH reads this and learns as well. It might help them come up with a software fix to correct this when locals come off of two different or three different sats at the same time.
