I'm frustrated with cable TV and considering a switch to DirecTV. Live in the city of Chicago, north lakefront community. Have a non obstructed view in all directions from the roof where the cable comes up from my apt. What kind of weather disruptions can I expect?
Weather impact to signal?
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Statistically DBS outages are no more prevalent than all the methods by which cable can be outed. Be advised all television distribution systems can be subject to signal disruption. My experiences with the PhaseIII (3 LNB) dish was far less outage than cable. If you are planning on the larger AT9 (5 LNB) dish, it should be even less or almost non-existent except in the worst weather possible. In chicago I would buy a snow/ice cover.
For me, and others I know with D* (all came from concast), satellite has a much higher uptime for us than cable, for Wilma, dishes were up and operational as soon as power was restored, for most concast subs, it took months, and some areas are still having issues.
Will you have any access to the dish? If you can broom it or shoot water, you'd have near 0 disruptions due to snow on it. Here in SE PA last year I had zero snow interruptions. Only ones I've had is the wet stuff and they are rare.
heavy storms are universal disruptions and you can't avoid it unless you live in a desert i guess.
If you can have the luxury of OTA, that will 'never' be disrupted. I frequently see dTV interrupted with all the heavy stuff we have gotten the past month but my OTA stuff gets recorded just fine.
heavy storms are universal disruptions and you can't avoid it unless you live in a desert i guess.
If you can have the luxury of OTA, that will 'never' be disrupted. I frequently see dTV interrupted with all the heavy stuff we have gotten the past month but my OTA stuff gets recorded just fine.
Someone on here posted a suggestion some time ago to use one of them toy super soakers to get snow off the dish from the ground if the dish was too high to reach safely, but it seems to me, that using pure water in that way would promote ice accumulation, but I suppose if you used a mixture of water+antifreeze (not sure how it would react to the dish chemically though), that it might solve the icing, *shrug* no point to my post, just sharing. 
newsposter said:
Buy a snow/ice cover for $25
We have monsoons and dust storms every 3rd or 4th day for 4 - 6 weeks out of the year!
Surely stronger but NEVER say NEVER, it can be weather effected. Which could also disrupt satellite retrans depending on what the issue is and how they deliver signal to the DBS provider.
charper1 said:
never was in quotes and i never did have an issue with OTA not working but DTV working
Assuming properly installed and plumb then you'll only see a signal loss on the most severe of thunderstorms to the southwest where the tall thunderheads block the signal. But then if it does go out it's back in 5-10 minutes at most. When cable went out it was out for days at a time. I laugh every time I see the ditch the dish ads with the falsehood about weather.
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