Slimline SWM LNB install...

[codewiz]

My friend decided to upgrade to HD and an HD-DVR at his home. He hasn't been a customer for long and directv could not guarantee he would get a SWM LNB for an install. He has fiber to the curb and only one coax run to every room. He didn't want holes in his house.

So I suggested that he could just order the HD-DVR and go buy a slimline with a SWM LNB and I would help install it.

I had recently done an upgrade of my slimline to include a SWM LNB so I thought it would be a pretty easy swap out.

We get the dish setup and aligned. Sat 101, 110, 119 all around 98-100 in signal. Sat 99 and 103 sitting at 90s or higher. Everything seems fine. Couple days later he says that HD channels are dropping out. Checked the signal strength and the 101 was sitting in the low 80s. He tried to realign the dish and couldn't get the 101 sat over 85 strength. I went over yesterday and I did an alignment from the start and never got above 87 on the 101. I knew something had to be wrong. He had his internet cable line near by so we jacked that and swapped everything to use that cable and went through the alignment process. Everything back up to really high 90s. Everything was working smoothly.

This morning, he tells me a few hours after I left, it dropped back to the mid 80s on the 101 again.

I am baffled by this behavior. What are the odds that two cables failed? The receiver he got was a refurb HR21. Could the receiver be the issue? If so how is he going to prove that? Or is this a SWM LNB/power inserter issue.

The cable run is right at 150 feet. About 100ft from dish to SWM power inserter. 50 feet from power inserter to receiver. No splitters yet. Yeah I know that is pushing it distance wise.

I am just baffled by the fact that it works perfectly for a certain amount of time then drops signal by about 20%.

[Grentz]

Out of curiosity, are you sure there are no other lines combining in/splitting off those lines that could be potentially connected to something else?

[codewiz]

Out of curiosity, are you sure there are no other lines combining in/splitting off those lines that could be potentially connected to something else?

It is absolutely a straight run. There are two couplers but no splitters/diplexers at all. We are eventually going to split it but until we had it working 100% we wanted to eliminate problems.

Tonight, I am going to swap my HR22 with him to see if my receiver exhibits the same behavior. He will get to enjoy a night or two of my programming package and I will have to suffer from his limited package at my house.

I just can't believe the exact same thing happened with two different coax runs. It wasn't complete failure just a drop of about 20-25% of signal strength after a certain amount of time. Something else that happened last night was at one point, it registered that tuner 1 could not acquire a signal but tuner 2 could. Weird because it is only connected with one cable so that makes me think it could be the internal splitter is on the fritz.

[Flugelman]

If you still have the old dish and a BBC, you could swap out dishes and check the 101 levels. Sounds like it could be LNB failure. Remember to take out the PI with the old LNB.

[codewiz]

If you still have the old dish and a BBC, you could swap out dishes and check the 101 levels. Sounds like it could be LNB failure. Remember to take out the PI with the old LNB.

Something even better would be to take my old slimline LNB and multiswitch and swap it out for testing purposes. That way we don't have to realign the dish. I have personally never had an LNB fail where it would work perfectly for a few hours then drop by about 20%.

[putty469]

LNB's can do very strange things when they fail. The previous poster was stating that swapping an old LNB and BBC's on the dish may be a good step.

[TigersFanJJ]

Just keep in mind that you may have to restart the dvr and run the satellite setup again if you put a non-swm lnb on the dish. Same thing goes for when you switch back to the swm lnb.

[codewiz]

I was incorrect in my statement earlier that no splitters were in the line. At some point, the splitter got reintroduced into the mix and I didn't realize it. He removed the splitter and things have improved. The splitter is just one in his distribution center so we had no assumptions that it would work with a SWM.

I should have been more thorough in my questioning and inspection of his cabling. I just thought since i had hooked it straight up that the splitter had not been in the equation. I was incorrect.

Hopefully that was the culprit.