Signal Loss With New Dish

[GPappy]

I have a Direct TV System at my home and wanted to add a dish at our cottage so that we could use it on the weekends. The previous owner had a Primestar system so I mounted a new dish to the existing pole and used the existing buried RG6 cable to connect to the house.

The system worked fine for about 15 minutes and then we lost signal. I checked all the connections and everything looked fine. When I reconnected the cable, the signal came back (about 80%) and worked for a few minutes more. If I disconnect the cable even for a few seconds, the signal will come back for a period of 10 seconds to several minutes. What should I be looking for?

I brought the system home and it works fine on our dish here.

Thanks in advance.

 

[boba]

Replace the cable, overtime it has developed corrosion/short and you are losing voltage to the LNB or signal from the LNB. Just run a cable from the dish for a quick check if you maintain good signal bury the new cable.

 

[GPappy]

boba,
Thanks for the feedback, I will try that the next time I am up there although I really hate to buy that much cable when I don't know for sure that is the problem. Any idea why a bad cable would cause it to would work for a period of time and then quit and yet start right back up again if I disconnect the coax and put it right back on, only to go out again a few moments later?
Thanks,
Greg

 

[Mr Tony]

moving to DirectTv forum...maybe somebody else has had this issue

 

[kryten98371]

Signal Problem

You don't need that much cable to test the setup. Bring your DirecTV receiver and a TV out to the area next to the dish (along with a long power cord and a power strip), and use a short piece of cable to test the dish. If it works fine out there, then you know that the burried cable is bad. At that time, you can spend the money for a long piece of cable.

 

[dishrich]

You also might want to trace & physically check the ENTIRE run of coax from the dish, particulary after it hits the house. It's possible that there might be splitters in the coax line that your D* receiver does NOT like. (P* installations that had multiple receivers in a house DID use splitters to run the multiple boxes, but are NOT compatable with D* receiver/dishes)

Also, you might want to check ANY splices that may be in the coax, like at the ground block. (P* REQUIRED the coax to be grounded, so you should have one somewhere)

 

[GPappy]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I did remove the splitters that were in the system so that is not it. Would an improper ground cause this kind of symptom?

 

[GPappy]

Problem solved. Based on your input I checked all of the connections and noticed one connector that looked like the center conductor was corroded. I cleaned it up and all is good.

Thanks for your help.