[TangoOversway]

I've had issues with OTA channels before. I have one of the older Hoppers that has to reboot every day and the OTA streams will get glitchy until you turn the Hopper back on and tune to an OTA channel. I've posted about that elsewhere.

Now I'm encountering another OTA issue. I haven't checked specific times yet, but about a month ago, on a Saturday night, sometime after midnight, I turned to an OTA channel and there was nothing. I got the normal dialog about troubleshooting or checking the guide. Every OTA channel was gone. The Hopper said there was no signal - for any of them. Last month when this happened, I checked the OTA antenna, cables, connections, signal amp, and so on. Everything was okay, but no OTA signal. I figured I'd troubleshoot it in the morning and left it as it was.

The next morning I got up and was going to troubleshoot it, but all the channels were back and normal. I hate when I can't fully troubleshoot a problem because I can't be sure of the cause. (Although, with DISH, I just figure it's bugs in their DVR and that explains most issues.)

It happened again this weekend. At this point, I don't know when the signals go bad, and I don't know when they come back. I only know that it happens to ALL the OTA channels.

In both cases I power cycled the Hopper, but that didn't help. (Well, it may have after half an hour or more - I didn't stay up that long to recheck it again.)

I don't see how this can be anything but a technical issue with the DISH equipment, since it happens to all the OTA channels at once and the two times it's happened, it's been Saturday, after midnight. That makes me think it's something like the forced reboot the Hopper and Joey has to go through every day. It's at a time an idiot might think nobody would be watching.

Has anyone else encountered anything like this?

 

[James Long]

All DISH equipment has a nightly reboot (not just "older" equipment). The reboot is the equipment shutting down and restarting, so it is fairly obvious. The reboot will be delayed if you are recording a program. If you are watching TV you will receive an on screen warning ... the first warning defaults to continue to watch TV, if you choose continue the second and subsequent warnings default to changing the receiver's settings to reboot at another time. The time can be set under Menu - Settings - Power Settings. You can choose any hour (whichever is more convenient) so if you are up all night and out during the day you could choose 10am as a daily reset time. There is also an "inactivity timeout" which will shut down the receiver after a set number of hours ... the default setting for that is four hours. The "inactivity timer" does not reboot the receiver, it simply shuts it off. While "off" the receiver will record any scheduled programs and run maintenance tasks such as guide downloads.

As for the OTA problems ... do you have one of the older USB modules or one of the newer "dual" tuners? It is possible that your USB module is failing. Are you getting any error messages on screen prior to noticing that the OTA channels were missing? Something like "OTA adapter removed"? Are the channels still in the guide and not tuneable or do they disappear from the guide? Have you tried disconnecting the USB module and moving it to the other USB port? Do you record OTA channels?

The OTA module doesn't do anything unless you are watching or recording an OTA channel - but if you have a bad module or a bad connection to your module it could be disconnecting from your receiver.

 

[TangoOversway]

So all DISH equipment reboots daily? Wow. When I ran my data mining business, I could keep my computers running for months at a time without having to reboot. (They'd only reboot on a power failure longer than about 30 minutes.) It's rather disappointing that a company as big as DISH can't design systems intended for longer uptime. (And I can't tell you how often I've had my Hopper reboot in the middle of recording something!)

I have an older OTA tuner module, that connects to the Hopper with a USB connection. So far I haven't been watching the TV when the OTA module has gone down. Often I have the TV on when I'm working (I work best with background noise). It's entirely possible an alert showed up and I didn't see it. (At least one time I was watching a DVD for a few hours and it probably went down during that time. The TV I was watching is connected to the Joey, not the Hopper.)

Until now, I did not realize there were other possibilities. My Hopper only has 4 tuners, with one reserved as an OTA tuner. If I used a dual tuner with an older Hopper, could I still access 2 OTA channels at once?

Right now I am very seriously considering dropping DISH in September, when my contract ends. (Maybe sooner if they don't add a penalty charge for 3 months or less.) I've realized that 95% of what I watch is on the OTA channels in my area. There are 1-2 channels I'd still like to get, but I can live without them. I'm looking into DVRs I can use with just an OTA system now.

With that in mind, I don't want to spend a lot of money on fixing a DISH system.

It could be that my OTA tuner is going bad, but the timing being the same the two times it's gone out makes it look much more like something is shutting it down for some reason.

(I just went through a similar issue with Viasuck - er, Viasat. I'd lose internet at the same time every hour and it took a while to prove to those helping me that the modem was actually deliberately rebooting every single freaking hour.)

 

[James Long]

The Hopper 2000 only uses one of the tuners if you have the dual tuner OTA module.
Check your Hopper's settings to see what you have the inactivity and reboot times set to.

 

[TangoOversway]

So, with an older Hopper, the dual tuner will still only be able to be used for one channel?

It took me a few weeks to work out when to set my Hopper to reboot. I finally changed it to 6:00 PM. Odd time for a reboot, but I do my work mostly at night and need background noise while I work, so it's on at night a lot. It turns out that was the best time in terms of not interrupting anything I want to watch or record.

I find the Joey tends to reset about 6:05 or so, but sometimes the Hopper will not reboot then and will still reboot at some odd time, whether it's recording or not.

In all honesty, I am far from impressed with the software DISH uses. I used to run a data mining business, based 100% on my own software. I only had a couple programming classes in college and the rest is self taught. If, as a self taught coder, I found it easy to write software and develop a system that could run for months and months without rebooting, I find it hard to respect a multi-million dollar corporation that can't do the same.