Salt Lake Locals Now on D10

[aramus8]

A few weeks back D* announced they were "migrating" the Salt Lake HD locals to D10. Yesterday I ran system tests after tuning to a couple of the locals on the satellite and I kept getting a signal strength of 90 on the satellite tuners. Since the signal strength still showed 97 from transponder 4 on the Spaceway, I was a little puzzled. I looked at the other signal strengths and it appears the 90 signal is coming from D10, transponder 21. The odd part about this is transponder 19 on D10 shows 100. Why aren't they using that one? Wasn't transponder 21 supposed to be Phoenix?

[bobnielsen]

The same transponder number (which corresponds to the frequency) can be used by more than one spotbeam (which is why they use spotbeams). It is a different physical transponder.

[Tom Robertson]

Since Salt Lake's DMA is all of UT, I would not expect DIRECTV to use the same TP frequency for Phoenix's and Salt Lake's spotbeams, unless they were the same TP itself. Too much chance for interference. IIRC, Phoenix's DMA is pretty large too, but I'm not positive.

Happy Holidays!
Tom

[texasbrit]

A few weeks back D* announced they were "migrating" the Salt Lake HD locals to D10. Yesterday I ran system tests after tuning to a couple of the locals on the satellite and I kept getting a signal strength of 90 on the satellite tuners. Since the signal strength still showed 97 from transponder 4 on the Spaceway, I was a little puzzled. I looked at the other signal strengths and it appears the 90 signal is coming from D10, transponder 21. The odd part about this is transponder 19 on D10 shows 100. Why aren't they using that one? Wasn't transponder 21 supposed to be Phoenix?

Why do you think that your locals are coming from TP21 and not TP19 anyway?

[aramus8]

Why do you think that your locals are coming from TP21 and not TP19 anyway?
When I run the system test after setting both channels to a local, the signal strength on both tuners shows 90 which matches transponder 21's signal of 90 on the signal strength screen and is the only transponder on anything from 103 with that reading. The only other possibility would be that since I am running a CE something has changed where the signal strength on the system test no longer matches the signal strength screens on the spot beams. They always have matched before.

[RyMcQ]

Does this have anything to do with getting SLC HD channels to the whole DMA? I'm in the corner of Utah and I can only get SD locals, supposedly because the current spotbeam does not reach my city. When I try to tune to the local HD channels, I get a searching for signal message.

I checked my transponders on 103(a) and I get zeros for both transponders 19 and 21.

Does anyone know what this means for me?

[texasbrit]

Does this have anything to do with getting SLC HD channels to the whole DMA? I'm in the corner of Utah and I can only get SD locals, supposedly because the current spotbeam does not reach my city. When I try to tune to the local HD channels, I get a searching for signal message.

I checked my transponders on 103(a) and I get zeros for both transponders 19 and 21.

Does anyone know what this means for me?

What signals do you get for all the transponders on 103(b)?

[aramus8]

Does this have anything to do with getting SLC HD channels to the whole DMA? I'm in the corner of Utah and I can only get SD locals, supposedly because the current spotbeam does not reach my city. When I try to tune to the local HD channels, I get a searching for signal message.

I checked my transponders on 103(a) and I get zeros for both transponders 19 and 21.

Does anyone know what this means for me?That's not good. I agree we need to know what your 103(b) readings are. Your dish may be out of alignment.

[RyMcQ]

That's not good. I agree we need to know what your 103(b) readings are. Your dish may be out of alignment.

Here are my readings:

103(a)

0 97 49 0 0 98 N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 87 0
83 0 0 0 0 0 95 95
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

103(b)

80 80 79 78 83 85 79 80
82 83 82 83 88 91 N/A N/A
83 N/A N/A N/A N/A 91 N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

I'm worried that this means that the new signal is also going to be on a spotbeam that doesn't hit my corner of the DMA (the southwest corner of Utah, 300 miles away from SLC). Fortunately for now, I have the LA MPEG-2 HD feeds, but everything is on 2 hours later and I would like some of the local HD programming. And I'm worried that the national feeds are going to get killed.

Is there a special number to call about this? I periodically call and talk to CSRs who are apologetic, but ultimately unhelpful. Isn't there an HD group at DirecTV that I could call and complain to? The community I'm in is one of the fastest growing cities in the country and people are picking Dish because they can get HD locals. You'd think DirecTV would care about that...

[aramus8]

Are both tuners seeing about the same readings? Your readings on 103(b) are a little low although it doesn't look like tweaking the dish will help much in getting the spot beam you need. It has only been a few days though so maybe D* is still playing with it. I don't think you'll get very far calling D* although you might get in touch with engineers at KSL and KUTV as they are aware of the situation and may have more of a direct line to D* to at least let you know what's going on. Unless something has changed in the past couple of months Dish does not carry the SLC ABC outlet, no contract.

[RyMcQ]

Both tuners are roughly the same. I haven't had much of a problem with "searching for signal" with any other channels. I'm not sure what channels I would have problems with though.

When you mentioned that they were shuffling the channels to a different satellite, I figured that they must be doing it to broaden the spot beam. I hope I'm not wrong.

I will call the station engineers and see what they have to say.

Thanks for your input.