On Wednesday Auguest 31, our DirecTV went out. I did the magic rebooting of the TiVo dance, but to no avail. A tech came out on Friday September 2nd and replaced the multi-switch1 as well as the power supply to the multi-switch; fixing the problem. On Saturday the 3rd, it was broken again.
A tech came out yesterday and somehow things had magically fixed themselves right before he showed up. He explained to me that rather than look for possible problems, he would rather not do anything2 - so he left… and sure enough the problem returned today.
The current problem is that we don’t get reception on any even numbered transponders. A reboot of the TiVo has placed it in a wonderful state where we can’t even watch the channels we are getting because it fails to “communicate with satellite”.
After about 2 hours on the phone w/ DirecTV and the local installer company today3, I finally go ahold of someone who would give me more than a standard canned answer.
I did a little configuring and we debugged the problem down to (most likely) a short in one of the 4 wires coming from the dish to the multi-switch. I could test this myself, but I’ve got a lot of other stuff to do and a tech will be coming back for a 3rd time on Monday. At least I’ve got the direct number to the local installer office and the name of someone there with a brain.
Unfortunately, I missed the opening NFL game… I’d kinda been looking forward to that.
- The thing that splits the signal from the satellite to the different receivers. [back]
- Not in those exact words - but that is what he said. [back]
- If you can’t get a tech out here when the problem is occuring and the tech won’t do anything when the problem isn’t occuring - how do I get this fixed? [back]
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