HR20: All my even numbered channels are missing.

Check the signal strengths. What dish do you have? I'd check all connections between the dish and the receiver for any looseness or corrosion. Also, try swapping the sat inputs on the HR20.

I had the same problem two years ago. It turned out to be a combination of a bad tuner in the HR20, faulty wiring, and an old dish.

Justinto said:

I had the same problem two years ago. It turned out to be a combination of a bad tuner in the HR20, faulty wiring, and an old dish.

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:lol: Bet that was fun to troubleshoot! To the OP, the most frequent cause of reception problems is loose/corroded connectors in the antenna lines. Grab a 7/16" wrench and check all your connectors by removing them, examining the inside of the connector for corrosion, and re-tightening until snug.

Is this your only receiver? If not, what are the others doing? Agree that a good plan would be to try to reboot the HR20 first on one antenna line and then the other into the SAT1 input. That should identify an individual bad antenna line/connectors.

Do you also have an external multi-switch? That could bring up additional complexities.

Well, I did a Menu Restart, no help. I did a red button restart, no help. Finally, I unplugged and re-plugged in the unit and now everything is working fine. I wonder if this is a sign of major trouble ahead.

I had the exact same experience with my unit. Had to unplug to reset. I'm scrambling to get two programs on the disk moved to my GOOD dvr (a 2004 Panisonic) so I can return the POS. So much for all the extra cash I spend on HD service. What a waste of customer goodwill - offer a good service for the money and ruin the experience with a crappy unreliable dvr.

kimi said:

What a waste of customer goodwill - offer a good service for the money and ruin the experience with a crappy unreliable dvr.

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perfect summation of directv, with the possible addition of "and very poor customer service".

montag said:

Well, I did a Menu Restart, no help. I did a red button restart, no help. Finally, I unplugged and re-plugged in the unit and now everything is working fine. I wonder if this is a sign of major trouble ahead.

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Hmmmm, possible electrical surge just scrambled things up and unplugging cleared it out. I've seen that on both computers and DirecTV receivers that weren't on UPS's. Do you have a UPS on your DVR? If not even getting a cheap one can protect it from quick power glitches.

rb5505 said:

perfect summation of directv, with the possible addition of "and very poor customer service".

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I don't really agree with that, however. There are several good things about Directv customer service - it's nice to always speak with an american, and for what they are allowed to help you with, they do a good job with that and are polite about it. I'm not satisfied with the help I've gotten about non-standard problems, such as the garbage ads in the guide, and some simple problems I had with the DVR box at first which turned out to be trivial. But overall I think customer service is pretty good.

The problem comes when you have a non-standard issue. Then it seems like a big problem. It's not the fault of customer service, though, IMO

The OP said even numbered CHANNELS not even numbered transponders. If it really was "channels", the channels are randomly spread across different satellites and transponders and only the receiver knows the channel mapping. So it can't be anything to do with the dish, the LNB, cabling or corroded connectors. It is just a screwup in the receiver, probably a very obscure software bug.