[CliffV]

This afternoon I was talking to our yard dude. He was trimming some bushes and mentioned that he'd just pruned the roses in the rose garden. I thanked him for his hard work and went about my business. My wife and I decided to go catch a movie. We got home just as it was getting dark. My wife turned on the TV to catch the Vice Presidential debate and remarked that all the channels were getting a "771 Channel Not Available" message.

It then dawned on me that our satellite dishes are in the rose garden. Apparently our yard dude bumped one of the dishes out of alignment.

To make an even longer story short, I'm grateful to this forum for having tought me how to re-align a dish myself. I was able to do an emergency re-alignment in the dark and get us back online. It'd be really bad if we'd have to wait weeks to DirecTv to roll a truck to do the re-alignment.

Cheers,
Cliff

 

[Cmnore]

Glad to hear that. How long did it take you to get it toed-in?

 

[Grentz]

Glad you got it working, always nice to be able to DIY things so you dont have to wait for a Directv truck

 

[houskamp]

Might want to tighten it down more.. shouldn't be that easy to knock out of wack (unless you have a realy clumsy gardener)

 

[CliffV]

Glad to hear that. How long did it take you to get it toed-in?

Once I convinced myself it was just out of alignment, it only took about 10 more minutes to re-align.

First I had to figure out which dish was "bad". My setup is a little odd because of trees. This thread describes the setup and has photos. http://dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=92239 . But once I found that I was only missing signal on the 99 and 101 satellites, that narrowed it down.

Then I had to inspect the buried wires to make sure they weren't chopeed through.

All told, it took about 45 to 50 minute from "nothing working" to "back up and running".

 

[CliffV]

Might want to tighten it down more.. shouldn't be that easy to knock out of wack (unless you have a realy clumsy gardener)

Good call. I'm actually doing the fine tuning this morning. I'll make sure everything is secure.