Strange Response from Installer on 771 Issue

[Trekkie]

After not being able to have DirecTV due to a treeline for about four years I was able to get it re-installed recently.

After about two weeks of having it, around Apr 28 - May 5th I suddenly got 771 issues on my HD DVR and HD Receivers in the house.

It was intermittent at first on just the second tuner, and then got worse, and then eventually disappeared.

I had to fight with DirecTV just to get someone out, and they finally came out today when everything was fine.

My wife was there, as I had to work. She tells me that the installer her told her that they should have known this was happening because late april/early may there is always an issue where the sun reflects oddly and causes this. It'll go away after a few rotations of the planet and you're good to go again.

WTF? :confused:

Is that for real? I never saw this back in Kansas when I had DirecTV before, never experienced it, and a co-worker who has it never heard of it either and hasn't experienced it. The reason I care is that step 3 of 'Advanced technical Support' great care required I reset my DVR to the defaults and loose all my programming or they wouldn't troubleshoot any more. I was out of town the previous two weeks and lost over 30 hours of programming and I'm a little ticked off about it and thinking of arguing to give me the first month charge back because of that what I paid for was wasted.

[AnonomissX]

sparkle. but it shouldnt kill signal completely. Did a tree grow bigger in the path of the dish?

[Trekkie]

If a tree did do it, it shrunk after a few days and has been ok ever since.

[harsh]

She tells me that the installer her told her that they should have known this was happening because late april/early may there is always an issue where the sun reflects oddly and causes this. It'll go away after a few rotations of the planet and you're good to go again.This happens twice a year. It depends on where you live both in terms of latitude and longitude. There's a thread somewhere around here about aiming your dish based on the position of the sun that will tell you if that was the problem or not. When the sun is "behind" the satellite, it overpowers the signal coming from the satellite. It only lasts for a few minutes each day.

The Ka satellites (99W, 103W) are going to be more susceptible to this phenomenon than the Ku satellites.

[gabe23]

I live a few miles from Wake Forest and I've never had any significant problems with solar interference in over 10 years of DirecTV. Like harsh said, even if you do have a problem, it's only going to last a few minutes a day. And I've plugged North Carolina into several solar outage calculators, and all the dates are in March, not May. Sounds to me like the installer was feeding a line of BS to your wife.

One thing that may or may not have any bearing on the situation. There was an outage of all the local HD stations for many Raleigh area subscribers that started around 4/27 and lasted until around 5/2. But if this was the problem you were having, you would have still received all your other channels.

[Ext 721]

After not being able to have DirecTV due to a treeline for about four years I was able to get it re-installed recently.

After about two weeks of having it, around Apr 28 - May 5th I suddenly got 771 issues on my HD DVR and HD Receivers in the house.

It was intermittent at first on just the second tuner, and then got worse, and then eventually disappeared.

I had to fight with DirecTV just to get someone out, and they finally came out today when everything was fine.

My wife was there, as I had to work. She tells me that the installer her told her that they should have known this was happening because late april/early may there is always an issue where the sun reflects oddly and causes this. It'll go away after a few rotations of the planet and you're good to go again.

WTF? :confused:

Is that for real? I never saw this back in Kansas when I had DirecTV before, never experienced it, and a co-worker who has it never heard of it either and hasn't experienced it. The reason I care is that step 3 of 'Advanced technical Support' great care required I reset my DVR to the defaults and loose all my programming or they wouldn't troubleshoot any more. I was out of town the previous two weeks and lost over 30 hours of programming and I'm a little ticked off about it and thinking of arguing to give me the first month charge back because of that what I paid for was wasted.


review the WONDERFUL thread about sighting the satellites using the sun.

on those days and times where the sun is scheduled to "work" for sighting in your area, it is not unusual for some signal "loss" at those times, for no more than a few minutes.

any other day/time it's close to impossible for the sun to be the culprit.

[HDTVsportsfan]

This might be the thread Harsh is referring too.

http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=63277

[Trekkie]

the more I think about it, the more I realize there's no way it was the sun

It was about 10PM at night when I was on the phone complaining about it. It had started mid-day, and by the evening when my wife was upset that Desperate Housewives & Brothers & sisters didn't get recorded is when I started looking.

:mad: