Dish 301 Program Guide Problem

3654 Views 5 Replies 5 Participants Last post by Robert F. O'Connor, Sep 9, 2002

mluczkowski

Discussion Starter · Sep 8, 2002

I have a 301 receiver and when I go into the program guide the preview window says "retrieving program information from satellite" and stays black for about one minute. During this time I only can scroll over in the guide about 2 hours until the guide displays "info not available" in the guide for all the channels.

Once the preview window finally displays video I have about an extra 2 hours of guide but once I get about 4 hours into the guide I get the popup window saying "attention: retrieving program information from satellite" again. Once that is done I scroll over another hour or two and it pops up again with the same message about retrieving the guide.

If I cancel out of my guide and then go back into it again the process starts all over! If it was noon and I wanted to see who was on Letterman that night it would take me about 10 minutes to get that far in the guide!

Is this correct behavior for these 301's? I called Dish up and they said that it was working correctly but I can't believe that they can sell these things if this is the way they work.

Also anyone know if they are going to offer upgrades for 501 owners to get the dual PVR?

Thanks for any help!

Mark

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gcutler

· #2 · Sep 8, 2002

That is the way it does work. Except for PVRs which hold the info on the hard drive that is the way it will work for any dish non-PVR. Same problem on my 4900, and probably 3900. The guide info is on a different transponder than the channel you wanted to see in the PIP guide, so it has to get the info it needs before returning to the transponder required for whatever channel you want to see in the EPG. With all the channels now included for Locals and Must carry the problem has just gotten worse.

Only 2 solutions

1) replace it with a Dish PVR unit
2) Switch to DirectTV

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HTguy

· #3 · Sep 8, 2002

Yes, one of the great things about the PVRs is that the EPG Info is cached on the hard drive for 7 days so it is instantly available.

For 301 users I recommend:

Turn on the Guide whenever there is a station break or you take a break. Then it can update when you're not watching anything important.
Be sure to "turn off" the rcvr when not in use so it can download any updates & be ready for use when you want it.
Turn off the PIP in the Guide. Set it for full page listings. The feature just isn't very useful because of the need to switch transponders when the EPG is updating.
Use the "Browse" feature to keep an eye on what you're watching while you channel surf. It works a lot better since it only needs the cuurent "block" of listings info.

Don't expect an upgrade promotion for current PVR users.

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Jacob S

· #4 · Sep 8, 2002

If you would finally get a picture on the PIP, then you took it off of PIP then back on PIP again, would you have to wait again or would it keep the info on the chip? I dont see why Dish did not make a bigger chip to resolve this problem when DirecTv receivers do not do this, according to what I been told.

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gcutler

· #5 · Sep 8, 2002

I hear the D* puts the guide on all transponders so you never have to switch transponders to get guide and PIP. For dish to do what you state, they would have to spend more money on the recievers. Which they do everything to keep the price down (sometimes at the cost of parts quality.)

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Robert F. O'Connor

· #6 · Sep 9, 2002

At the last Tech Chat this was noted as a known problem that they were going to work on fixing.

The underlying problem is that your unit is downloading guide information for 200+ local channels that you do not get or see in the guide. This is exacerbated by the fact that local listings appear in the guide three different places, resulting in 600+ channel listings that your unit has to cache even though it will never display them.

They could fix this perhaps by giving the guide-management software the ability to discard non-relevant information, but more likely (because it would probably involve fewer (or no) software changes and so would be less error-prone in the long run) they will move most local guide information to the spotbeams that carry those channels, so that most receivers will only see core-channel, premium and "distant net" locals info.

This probably will not occur until after E*VIII is in place and they have moved all the applicable local channels to spotbeams.

My understanding is that D* did something similar with its own spotbeam satellites.

-Robert

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