Whats causing these problems???

817 Views 4 Replies 3 Participants Last post by veryoldschool, Sep 15, 2008

SledgeHammer

Discussion Starter · Sep 15, 2008

1) I have OTA too, so I did the "ol' b-band in the attic" trick for both SAT 1 & SAT 2 so I could multiplex to downstairs. Everything was working fine. When I moved the HR20 upstairs, I had to pop the b-bands out of the attic and on to the HR20 itself since I couldn't really route the upstairs room through the b-band boxes in the attic, and since we are only talking about a week for the floors, I didn't want to bother trying to get it to work.

Anyways, I seem (or seemed) to be having a problem where I could not record SOME HD channels at the same time (I could do USAHD and NGCHD, but not ABC and FOX for example). The HD locals only seemed to work on 1 tuner.

Signal strength was 90+ on all tuners, all sats.

About 7 reboots later, it seemed like I can record both tuners again. What gives that it suddenly stopped working and suddenly started working?

2) Went to get ready for bed and came back to see the thing stuck on the bootup screen with the red light flashing. I read on here that its just overheating right? Not a sign of immeninent failure?

I did have it sitting on carpet, but have now proped it up on phone books so it can breath. Downstairs, it lives in an enclosed cabinet and never had any heat problems

. It really hates carpet.

Could this have caused problem #1?

3) Trying to get the 2 tuners to work, I redid the sat setup a few times. It seems to have cleared my guide info AND my Todo list. Is that normal? Or will the TODO list come back as the guide populates?

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Stuart Sweet

· #2 · Sep 15, 2008

The To Do list cleared as a result of multiple reboots. The system tries to heal itself to earlier and more basic states and sometimes that results in temporary loss of guide and to-do list. They should come back.

I don't know what's causing your problems but I can't help thinking it might have been the "ol' b-band trick". I will leave it to some folks who are better at diagnosing wiring, but I wonder if that was a big part of it.

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veryoldschool

· #3 · Sep 15, 2008

I wonder about the BBCs. They used to be flaky. The pigtail [cable] coming out of them, does it rotate [relative to the case]? It shouldn't. It seems the set screw has been left loose on many. This "could be why" you're having problems after the move.

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SledgeHammer

Discussion Starter · #4 · Sep 15, 2008

veryoldschool said:
I wonder about the BBCs. They used to be flaky. The pigtail [cable] coming out of them, does it rotate [relative to the case]? It shouldn't. It seems the set screw has been left loose on many. This "could be why" you're having problems after the move.

That could possibly explain why they started working again just as quickly as they stopped

. I dunno, I reseated them a few times and swapped the SAT 1 & SAT 2 a few times too. The HR20 I got was one of the last ones out there in the channel after the HR21s got released. Were the BBCs flaky at that point?

It could have been the heat too... as I said, when I first moved the HR20 upstairs, I just put it on the carpet, and it overheated after about 15 minutes and shutdown. Only after I propped it up on the phonebooks did the tuners start working as expected too.

Then again, I changed so many things, its hard to tell what really caused the (temporary) problem.

Stuart, while the BBC in the attic trick is not officially supported by DTV, its known to work perfectly by many on the board. That set up was working perfectly downstairs.

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veryoldschool

· #5 · Sep 15, 2008

"I think" BBCs are still flaky even with the newer black ones that come with the -21 series, though not as many.
All of those that came with my -20 series, all had the rotating pigtail and the replacements didn't.

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