Foto-n-T
Well-known member
I'm posting this for informational purposes and hopefully it will save somebody a headache somewhere down the road if they ever run into this particular situation.
We use a non-HD Dish DVR receiver that gets taken out of the house and put in the 5th wheel when we travel. The dish itself is tri-pod mounted as we camp in wooded areas often and a roof mount won't work at least half the time.
This summer I left for Idaho a week before my wife. When she came up she brought the Dish receiver but neglected to bring the splitter as she didn't realize that it traveled with the receiver. I made a phone call to Dish to verify exactly what type of splitter I needed and they directed me to a local Radio Shack where they handed me the "correct" one. Although I had some issues with getting a signal initially I chocked it up to the fact that we were far enough north that we could almost smell Canada and that the satellite(s) were all the way down over the equator.
Almost immediately we started having issues with losing one or the other of the satellites, partial recordings and partial signal loss, again I blamed it on being so far north. This wasn't a constant thing but it was enough to irritate especially when you record something that you really want to see only to find that it showed as recorded but didn't exist. Over the course of the last several months I have completely replaced every inch of coax as well as the couplers and I even took a spare LNB and replaced that. Each time I made a change I figured "this has got to do it" and every time within a day or two we'd wind up with a signal loss, $%&#@!!
We spent a week at home before our departure for Texas and in hindsight I realize that we had zero problems while we were home which I of course at the time assumed was because we were farther south. Since we have semi-permanently landed now in Texas we once again started having problems and I was just short of admitting defeat and calling Dish to have a service call ($95) and possibly replacing the receiver. As a last ditch effort to avoid spending $95 worth of my beer money I asked our neighbor down here (a fulltimer) if he might have a spare splitter and he just happened to have one that actually said "Dish" on it. I pulled the Radio Shack one off and installed the "Dish" splitter and low and behold the problem has been eliminated.
It is my understanding that cable splitters don't work with satellite receivers but now I know that if you don't have the exact "correct" splitter then your reception is going to be compromised. I just wish it hadn't taken me three and a half months to come up with a solution. As my first flight instructor told me many years ago, "If you're flying along all fat dumb and happy and all of a sudden the big fan in front of you stops, undo whatever it was that you just did and it will more than likely fix the problem." DUH!!!
We use a non-HD Dish DVR receiver that gets taken out of the house and put in the 5th wheel when we travel. The dish itself is tri-pod mounted as we camp in wooded areas often and a roof mount won't work at least half the time.
This summer I left for Idaho a week before my wife. When she came up she brought the Dish receiver but neglected to bring the splitter as she didn't realize that it traveled with the receiver. I made a phone call to Dish to verify exactly what type of splitter I needed and they directed me to a local Radio Shack where they handed me the "correct" one. Although I had some issues with getting a signal initially I chocked it up to the fact that we were far enough north that we could almost smell Canada and that the satellite(s) were all the way down over the equator.
Almost immediately we started having issues with losing one or the other of the satellites, partial recordings and partial signal loss, again I blamed it on being so far north. This wasn't a constant thing but it was enough to irritate especially when you record something that you really want to see only to find that it showed as recorded but didn't exist. Over the course of the last several months I have completely replaced every inch of coax as well as the couplers and I even took a spare LNB and replaced that. Each time I made a change I figured "this has got to do it" and every time within a day or two we'd wind up with a signal loss, $%&#@!!
We spent a week at home before our departure for Texas and in hindsight I realize that we had zero problems while we were home which I of course at the time assumed was because we were farther south. Since we have semi-permanently landed now in Texas we once again started having problems and I was just short of admitting defeat and calling Dish to have a service call ($95) and possibly replacing the receiver. As a last ditch effort to avoid spending $95 worth of my beer money I asked our neighbor down here (a fulltimer) if he might have a spare splitter and he just happened to have one that actually said "Dish" on it. I pulled the Radio Shack one off and installed the "Dish" splitter and low and behold the problem has been eliminated.
It is my understanding that cable splitters don't work with satellite receivers but now I know that if you don't have the exact "correct" splitter then your reception is going to be compromised. I just wish it hadn't taken me three and a half months to come up with a solution. As my first flight instructor told me many years ago, "If you're flying along all fat dumb and happy and all of a sudden the big fan in front of you stops, undo whatever it was that you just did and it will more than likely fix the problem." DUH!!!