I've posted here before about the flaky 942 I've got. So flaky that three sessions with Dish Tech Support has gotten nowhere, but they haven't yet authorized a replacement. Well, I'm a bit of a troubleshooter and I started noticing some quirky yet consistent patterns of misbehaviour and have now isolated the problem. More below...
The Problem: Every day my 942 forgets its timers and has its EPG scrambled. Upon powering up each evening, I check my timer schedule and find it blank, and check the EPG and find that everything more than 3 hours out is unknown. Oddly, it makes no difference regardless of when I turn it on. If I turn it on at 3PM, it knows the EPG out to 6PM. If I turn it on at 7PM, it knows until 10PM. If I had a timer scheduled for 4PM but don't turn the 942 on until 6PM, then the timer doesn't fire.
Within 5 minutes of turning it on, I am prompted to download the program information again, and frequently, but not every night, to run a checkswitch. Many nights I can't watch any programming until I run through 10 minutes of downloading and checkswitch testing. On other nights, the "download" quits after 30 seconds and all my EPG info and timers are back. I haven't yet found any pattern to this behaviour.
Oh I should add that once I do the "power on re-update" that all of my older and on-going timers all come back to life. They go to wherever the good EPG info goes after the scramble.
The Source of The Problem?: Okay late one Friday night I was still watching at 3AM. I was prompted if I wanted to download the EPG and I said no. The next evening when I turned the 942 on, the EPG and timers were all fine. No reloading required. But the following day everything was back to the same old problem. So on the next weekend I again responded no to the 3AM update and once again, the next day (after a power off cycle) everything was still fine.
Thus it appeared that the EPG was being scrambled by each 3AM update.
The Solution to The Problem?: I tried a few things, like setting up a new timer every three hours to try to keep the 942 from going through a power off cycle. This didn't work. Then I thought of trying to record through the 3AM update and so I recorded a movie from 1:30-3:30. This also didn't work.
Then I decided to try a more complex, longer recording cycle through the 3AM update. So I set up a timer from 2:00-4:00 and then another one from 2:30-4:30. To my surprise, the next day everything was fine. The timer I set up at 5PM for the following day worked. I repeated this experiment for each of the last three nights. Each time it worked.
What confuses me is that my EPG does continue to be updated. I checked two days ago for how far ahead the EPG info went, then checked tonight and it had two more days of data. So apparently setting up these recordings to conflict with the 3AM update only delays the update to a later time, however the delayed update no longer scrambles my EPG or timer data.
Very, very, very odd.
I can't wait to try to explain this to Dish Tech Support.
PS if anyone asks me a question more than two hours from now, I'll be delayed a couple of days before I can respond.
The Problem: Every day my 942 forgets its timers and has its EPG scrambled. Upon powering up each evening, I check my timer schedule and find it blank, and check the EPG and find that everything more than 3 hours out is unknown. Oddly, it makes no difference regardless of when I turn it on. If I turn it on at 3PM, it knows the EPG out to 6PM. If I turn it on at 7PM, it knows until 10PM. If I had a timer scheduled for 4PM but don't turn the 942 on until 6PM, then the timer doesn't fire.
Within 5 minutes of turning it on, I am prompted to download the program information again, and frequently, but not every night, to run a checkswitch. Many nights I can't watch any programming until I run through 10 minutes of downloading and checkswitch testing. On other nights, the "download" quits after 30 seconds and all my EPG info and timers are back. I haven't yet found any pattern to this behaviour.
Oh I should add that once I do the "power on re-update" that all of my older and on-going timers all come back to life. They go to wherever the good EPG info goes after the scramble.
The Source of The Problem?: Okay late one Friday night I was still watching at 3AM. I was prompted if I wanted to download the EPG and I said no. The next evening when I turned the 942 on, the EPG and timers were all fine. No reloading required. But the following day everything was back to the same old problem. So on the next weekend I again responded no to the 3AM update and once again, the next day (after a power off cycle) everything was still fine.
Thus it appeared that the EPG was being scrambled by each 3AM update.
The Solution to The Problem?: I tried a few things, like setting up a new timer every three hours to try to keep the 942 from going through a power off cycle. This didn't work. Then I thought of trying to record through the 3AM update and so I recorded a movie from 1:30-3:30. This also didn't work.
Then I decided to try a more complex, longer recording cycle through the 3AM update. So I set up a timer from 2:00-4:00 and then another one from 2:30-4:30. To my surprise, the next day everything was fine. The timer I set up at 5PM for the following day worked. I repeated this experiment for each of the last three nights. Each time it worked.
What confuses me is that my EPG does continue to be updated. I checked two days ago for how far ahead the EPG info went, then checked tonight and it had two more days of data. So apparently setting up these recordings to conflict with the 3AM update only delays the update to a later time, however the delayed update no longer scrambles my EPG or timer data.
Very, very, very odd.
I can't wait to try to explain this to Dish Tech Support.
PS if anyone asks me a question more than two hours from now, I'll be delayed a couple of days before I can respond.
