Weird problems with BEV install

[Robert T]

[Sorry for the crossposting, but it seems like anyone from these
newsgroups might know enough about Dish/EVu tech to help out.]

Got the blues about this, folks - and I'd like suggestions about what
might be going on. I don't really know how multiswitches work to
select between different satellites.

I have a Bell ExpressVu 9220 PVR (equivalent to Dish's 942). I got the
self-install kit because I'm miles from anywhere, so I have the 51cm
dish, dual LNBs and a pair of SW21 multiswitches.

I put the dish up on the roof, and about the first time I put the dish
on the pole and turned it, I saw signal from the 91 bird. But I could
only get the odd transponders - the evens are just not there, and never
have been. WTF? This happens even if I connect directly from an LNB
to one of the PVRs input cables (bypassing the switches), and persists
across swapping LNBs.

The next oddity - when I try to switch to the 82 satellite, I get the
signal but signal strength bar goes from green to yellow and says it's
picking up the wrong satellite, Bell ExpressVu 91. WTF? The birds
are nine degrees apart, so doesn't this mean switching problems?
I've seen this on the output of both SW21s.

I haven't ever picked up the 82 bird. Now, that may be because of the
trees near my house. That's fixable - I can move the dish 30 feet
further back from the trees. However, with the other issues, I wonder
if the receiver has lost the ability to switch properly. If I hated
the roof less, I might already have moved the dish to see what
changes. I need both satellites working to properly install this
thing, right?

Last oddity - looks like today, unlike yesterday, I can get a signal
on tuner 2 but not on tuner 1 from the same wire. The other wire seems
to have a problem.

Any ideas? Do I have problems with LNBs, switches or my receiver?
Or all of the above? What else can I test?

Rob

[Saiga]

Not sure what switch setting you have on the receiver right now... Try doing
a check switch to clear the setting then look for the signal... Sometimes
powering down and back up again helps...

Post by Robert T
[Sorry for the crossposting, but it seems like anyone from these
newsgroups might know enough about Dish/EVu tech to help out.]
Got the blues about this, folks - and I'd like suggestions about what
might be going on. I don't really know how multiswitches work to
select between different satellites.
I have a Bell ExpressVu 9220 PVR (equivalent to Dish's 942). I got the
self-install kit because I'm miles from anywhere, so I have the 51cm
dish, dual LNBs and a pair of SW21 multiswitches.
I put the dish up on the roof, and about the first time I put the dish
on the pole and turned it, I saw signal from the 91 bird. But I could
only get the odd transponders - the evens are just not there, and never
have been. WTF? This happens even if I connect directly from an LNB
to one of the PVRs input cables (bypassing the switches), and persists
across swapping LNBs.
The next oddity - when I try to switch to the 82 satellite, I get the
signal but signal strength bar goes from green to yellow and says it's
picking up the wrong satellite, Bell ExpressVu 91. WTF? The birds
are nine degrees apart, so doesn't this mean switching problems?
I've seen this on the output of both SW21s.
I haven't ever picked up the 82 bird. Now, that may be because of the
trees near my house. That's fixable - I can move the dish 30 feet
further back from the trees. However, with the other issues, I wonder
if the receiver has lost the ability to switch properly. If I hated
the roof less, I might already have moved the dish to see what
changes. I need both satellites working to properly install this
thing, right?
Last oddity - looks like today, unlike yesterday, I can get a signal
on tuner 2 but not on tuner 1 from the same wire. The other wire seems
to have a problem.
Any ideas? Do I have problems with LNBs, switches or my receiver?
Or all of the above? What else can I test?
Rob

[Transam]

make sure you are using ONLY rg6 cable. Check your wiring...one wire from
each seperate lnb should go to the input of the sw21. You can google "sw21
wiring diagram" for help there. If your picking up the bird and the strength
is good it is not a pointing problem. My guess is its bad wire or connectors
if its wired up correctly. Also, won't work until you do a switch check of
course...

hope this helps
-taz

Post by Saiga
Not sure what switch setting you have on the receiver right now... Try
doing a check switch to clear the setting then look for the signal...
Sometimes powering down and back up again helps...

Post by Robert T
[Sorry for the crossposting, but it seems like anyone from these
newsgroups might know enough about Dish/EVu tech to help out.]
Got the blues about this, folks - and I'd like suggestions about what
might be going on. I don't really know how multiswitches work to
select between different satellites.
I have a Bell ExpressVu 9220 PVR (equivalent to Dish's 942). I got the
self-install kit because I'm miles from anywhere, so I have the 51cm
dish, dual LNBs and a pair of SW21 multiswitches.
I put the dish up on the roof, and about the first time I put the dish
on the pole and turned it, I saw signal from the 91 bird. But I could
only get the odd transponders - the evens are just not there, and never
have been. WTF? This happens even if I connect directly from an LNB
to one of the PVRs input cables (bypassing the switches), and persists
across swapping LNBs.
The next oddity - when I try to switch to the 82 satellite, I get the
signal but signal strength bar goes from green to yellow and says it's
picking up the wrong satellite, Bell ExpressVu 91. WTF? The birds
are nine degrees apart, so doesn't this mean switching problems?
I've seen this on the output of both SW21s.
I haven't ever picked up the 82 bird. Now, that may be because of the
trees near my house. That's fixable - I can move the dish 30 feet
further back from the trees. However, with the other issues, I wonder
if the receiver has lost the ability to switch properly. If I hated
the roof less, I might already have moved the dish to see what
changes. I need both satellites working to properly install this
thing, right?
Last oddity - looks like today, unlike yesterday, I can get a signal
on tuner 2 but not on tuner 1 from the same wire. The other wire seems
to have a problem.
Any ideas? Do I have problems with LNBs, switches or my receiver?
Or all of the above? What else can I test?
Rob

[lawdogjr]

The missing EVEN transponder issue sounds like a cable problem. Are you
using RG-6 or RG-59 type cable? How long is the cable? Are the connectors
properly installed and/or fastened?

For the missing N82 signal, did you adjust the SKEW of the dish to capture
both feeds? Again, sounds like this adjustment wasnt done and you're locked
onto N91 exclusively.

Good luck.

Post by Robert T
[Sorry for the crossposting, but it seems like anyone from these
newsgroups might know enough about Dish/EVu tech to help out.]
Got the blues about this, folks - and I'd like suggestions about what
might be going on. I don't really know how multiswitches work to
select between different satellites.
I have a Bell ExpressVu 9220 PVR (equivalent to Dish's 942). I got the
self-install kit because I'm miles from anywhere, so I have the 51cm
dish, dual LNBs and a pair of SW21 multiswitches.
I put the dish up on the roof, and about the first time I put the dish
on the pole and turned it, I saw signal from the 91 bird. But I could
only get the odd transponders - the evens are just not there, and never
have been. WTF? This happens even if I connect directly from an LNB
to one of the PVRs input cables (bypassing the switches), and persists
across swapping LNBs.
The next oddity - when I try to switch to the 82 satellite, I get the
signal but signal strength bar goes from green to yellow and says it's
picking up the wrong satellite, Bell ExpressVu 91. WTF? The birds
are nine degrees apart, so doesn't this mean switching problems?
I've seen this on the output of both SW21s.
I haven't ever picked up the 82 bird. Now, that may be because of the
trees near my house. That's fixable - I can move the dish 30 feet
further back from the trees. However, with the other issues, I wonder
if the receiver has lost the ability to switch properly. If I hated
the roof less, I might already have moved the dish to see what
changes. I need both satellites working to properly install this
thing, right?
Last oddity - looks like today, unlike yesterday, I can get a signal
on tuner 2 but not on tuner 1 from the same wire. The other wire seems
to have a problem.
Any ideas? Do I have problems with LNBs, switches or my receiver?
Or all of the above? What else can I test?
Rob

[Robert T]

Post by Robert T
I have a Bell ExpressVu 9220 PVR (equivalent to Dish's 942). I got the
self-install kit because I'm miles from anywhere, so I have the 51cm
dish, dual LNBs and a pair of SW21 multiswitches.
I put the dish up on the roof, and about the first time I put the dish
on the pole and turned it, I saw signal from the 91 bird. But I could
only get the odd transponders - the evens are just not there, and never
have been. WTF? This happens even if I connect directly from an LNB
to one of the PVRs input cables (bypassing the switches), and persists
across swapping LNBs.

So this was, as some thought, a wiring problem - I had a dead short
in one of the short cables I'd made. After I found that, I got both
sets of transponders. This also cleared up a sporadic overheating
issue I'd started to see - I guess 19VDC into a half-ohm can do that :-)

Post by Robert T
The next oddity - when I try to switch to the 82 satellite, I get the
signal but signal strength bar goes from green to yellow and says it's
picking up the wrong satellite, Bell ExpressVu 91. WTF? The birds
are nine degrees apart, so doesn't this mean switching problems?
I've seen this on the output of both SW21s.

This persisted, and seemed to just be pointing. I couldn't do it by
hand without better feedback, so I had an installer with a nifty
satellite analyser come out, and he fixed me up. So I'm up and all
activated!

Rob

[Robert T]

Robert T wrote:

I have a Bell ExpressVu 9220 PVR (equivalent to Dish's 942), and it's
been activated, what, three weeks now, I guess. I wanted to mention
a few thoughts. Them and a twonie ought to get you a cup of coffee on
a good day :-)

I'm surprised by the short guide - I can see 44-46 *hours* into the
future with it. That's pretty grim, I figured. I had a Directivo
when I was in the US, and they give you a much longer view. One
thing I figured I could do to get around this was to save some
searches and reuse them when I checked for some programs every
day or two, but no - some planned parenthood poster child had
coded the box to "forget" my queries automatically after a short
time (2-3 hours?). What a great way to make something worse! At
least let me save searches until I delete them. In practice, I
use http://zap2it.com to find programs and create manual timers,
converting them to timers from the guide later when it's near to
air time. That's a lot of work, but I get my shows.

Another sad part is the PVR screen. I can see six shows in it,
so I'm forever scrolling up and down to see what's on the box.
An option to punt the live TV window like the guide has would be
more useful here.

I do like the program guide. It took some errors to realize that
you could jump forward or backward a day with the forward and
backward skip keys, but that's nice. Another good thing is that
the forward and back skip work well. I'm still tuned to Tivo's
overshooting a bit on back skip, but that's almost trained out.

Overall, the hardware is a great thing. The dual-mode is just
great! I have that running to a switchbox to feed my VCR, my
DVD recorder and a wireless sender to my office, so I can dub
shows off while watching something or listen to Galaxie or
the CBC in my office. Very nice. I wish for S-Video on TV2,
but the results are still okay.

I was amused that the OTA tuner could see and add analog OTA
channels when I'd first taken it out of the box, but that the
current software disables the analog channels. Oh well, there
isn't a lot in the air here anyway. I've heard an upgrade may
add this back some time.

The biggest improvements I can imagine are name-based recording,
so we might have a chance of finding shows when they move, and
keep-at-most so I could prevent one show from taking over while
I travel. I find I don't miss suggestions and thumbs from the
Tivo days.

OBTW, if you're a bug hunter, try recording a Galaxie channel
some time and play it back. It first starts fast-forwarding
rapidly, but a back skip will start it playing properly, with
track titles and artist names (which is good). You can get it
stuck in audio mode, though, even if you try to go to Live TV -
I had a lot of fun in that mode before I reset it to get back
to normal.

What else? Well, it's nice to have hockey back, and The
National, and the time-shifting, so I'd have to say I'm glad
to be a Bell customer.

Rob T

[Robert T]

Post by Robert T
What else? Well, it's nice to have hockey back, and The
National, and the time-shifting, so I'd have to say I'm glad
to be a Bell customer.

As I was writing this, my PVR was doing something weird, apparently.
I'm in Alberta, but my PVR "moved" me by two hours to Eastern Time.
Lord knows why this should ever happen - the right way to handle
this is to do all computations in GMT and only think about timezone
as something you handle before you display something, but my timers
are all now broken by two hours. A reset didn't help, and despite
calling Bell and having them promise to send my machine a signal
"within 1-24 hours", it's still not right, so I will have to call
them again and hack around the mistake with manual timers. Not
the worst thing that can happen, but this is kinda silly.

Rob T

[unknown]

Well think of it this way, at least you will get all your Edmonton Oilers
and Calgary Flames games that play locally.

Post by Robert T

Post by Robert T
What else? Well, it's nice to have hockey back, and The
National, and the time-shifting, so I'd have to say I'm glad
to be a Bell customer.

As I was writing this, my PVR was doing something weird, apparently.
I'm in Alberta, but my PVR "moved" me by two hours to Eastern Time.
Lord knows why this should ever happen - the right way to handle
this is to do all computations in GMT and only think about timezone
as something you handle before you display something, but my timers
are all now broken by two hours. A reset didn't help, and despite
calling Bell and having them promise to send my machine a signal
"within 1-24 hours", it's still not right, so I will have to call
them again and hack around the mistake with manual timers. Not
the worst thing that can happen, but this is kinda silly.
Rob T

[sn00p]

blackouts piss me off, starkchoice had the riders/stamps game blacked out
so i missed it.... bastards

Post by unknown
Well think of it this way, at least you will get all your Edmonton Oilers
and Calgary Flames games that play locally.

Post by Robert T

Post by Robert T
What else? Well, it's nice to have hockey back, and The
National, and the time-shifting, so I'd have to say I'm glad
to be a Bell customer.

As I was writing this, my PVR was doing something weird, apparently.
I'm in Alberta, but my PVR "moved" me by two hours to Eastern Time.
Lord knows why this should ever happen - the right way to handle
this is to do all computations in GMT and only think about timezone
as something you handle before you display something, but my timers
are all now broken by two hours. A reset didn't help, and despite
calling Bell and having them promise to send my machine a signal
"within 1-24 hours", it's still not right, so I will have to call
them again and hack around the mistake with manual timers. Not
the worst thing that can happen, but this is kinda silly.
Rob T

[DevilsPGD]

Post by sn00p
blackouts piss me off, starkchoice had the riders/stamps game blacked out
so i missed it.... bastards

Just move somewhere that they don't have hockey (at least for billing
purposes)