bad directv dish?

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Pig_Pen

Pig_Pen

Member
Joined
Oct 10, 2006
Posts
18
Location
Minnesota
I picked up a used dual lnb round directv dish to use on a tripod since I am going to take our spare receiver from home.  The receiver is a samsung sir-s300w.  On our home, we have a oval triple lnb dish since our other receiver is a tivo.  I tried setting up the dish in our yard with the receiver in the mh to no avail.  I changed the dish type in the receiver settings to a round but cannot get a signal.  The receiver has a auto detect feature to determine the dish type, but when run, says it failed and was unable to detect the dish and to check the line and the dish.  I have used a couple of different cables to rule that out.  I wasn't using anything to line up the dish, just looking at the direction of the one on the house and making small adjustments.

Did I get hosed on the used dish or am I missing something with the setup?  what are the odds that head is bad?

Any help or advice would be great before I purchase another lnb for it.

Thanks in advance.

PP
 
PP,
A couple of questions: Was that particular receiver working before in your home? Did you try running cables directly from the LNB to the receiver to eliminate any possibility of a switch box mis-setting or failure? Did you check all cable ends for adequate inner conductor length and possible shorts from the shielding? I'm curious about another thing: You said you had a triple LNB because of TIVO. I have TIVO also, but only a dual LNB. What's the third one for? 
 
Hi Karl,
Yes the receiver works fine in our home and I did run a cable directly from the satellite dish to the receiver ( I even connected a vcr through the cable to make sure the cable was ok ).

Currently we are not using the third lnb for anything.  I think it was because our system was a 4 room setup, but we only took 2 receivers.

I found in my manual that the auto detection only works if you have a strong signal, which explains why it didn't work.  I am not really sure why a person would autodetect the dish type if they already had a signal?
 
I will answer that last question:

There are a number of different types of dishes but ALL of them have a default mode, and it's the same default mode.

It is this Default mode you use to point the dish, once the dish is pointed then different types of dishes can see multiple satellites, and of course there are two different transmitters on each frequency (yes, they double up) normally called V and H they are really R and L  but you don't need to know that, all you need to know is that the way the receiver selects them is different from dish to dish

So it has to auto detect by trying different selection methods and seeing which one works.  During auto detect it tries to change transponders, it tries to change satellites (LNB's) and when it finds the best pattern... It remembers it.
 
This sounds like a lot of work and a lot of high tech, but in reality it's a brute force thing

Try one Did it work, No, Try two, Did it work, Try 3... And so on till it works
 
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