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[FrenchMovieTheme]

i have directv, and everytime it rains or gets kind of windy SOME of the channels come in screechy and distorted, while other channels are perfectly normal. is there anything i can do to guard against bad weather?

 

[beerbelly]

I don't think there's much you can do if the problem is due to weather.

 

[Thomas8354]

Get Cable.

 

[FrenchMovieTheme]

Get Cable.

i've had cable. if you had the choice between bad weather every once in a while or adelphia cable believe me you would take the former.

 

[Thomas8354]

I've got adelphia, and I love it. High speed internet for the win

 

[FrenchMovieTheme]

perhaps its just shitty in my area then, but holy christ did it suck. the channel listing was a joke, the interface was extremely slow (they said it was because of wiring and that the "area would be upgraded" soon, 2 years later it was worse than when i first got it. it would literally take 5 seconds to channel up and see what was on another station without switching directly to that station), AND i was paying more per month for less channels!


p.s. plus i can't live without NFL Sunday Ticket, so cable is out of the question. SURELY there has to be some kind of fix or remedy i can buy. i live in LA where there is bad weather maybe 2 months out of the year. if there are no fixes i hate to think what people with bad weather all year round do about satellite

 

[Anthropic]

My understanding is this:

1. Satellite has problems with thick clouds. Your typical thunderstorm contains 500,000,000 Kg of water vapor, so it's no surprise that dense clouds will screw with some wavelengths of radio waves. Take a look at the weather radar when you lose reception and see if you see anything to your south that could be in the way.

2. I'm betting the reason some channels are fine and others are not is that you have a system like my family's that uses multiple satellites to give you all of your channels. My guess is that you'll get spots in a cloud formation that are dense enough to degrade the signal lower than the error correction can deal with. At that point, you lose the signal. However, the different satellites are several degrees apart in the sky, so a spot could be in front of one satellite and not the other and you only lose the channels from one satellite. I think the way that Direct TV works is that the local channels, foreign language channels, and HD channels are on one satellite and everything else is on another.

 

[gblues]

i have directv, and everytime it rains or gets kind of windy SOME of the channels come in screechy and distorted, while other channels are perfectly normal. is there anything i can do to guard against bad weather?

Check to see if there's anything partially blocking the dish, like a tree or something. Also, check your signal strength while the weather is clear. Depending on what part of the country you're in, you should have signal in the 70-90 range. The higher your signal strength, the less the weather will interfere.

Also the weather shouldn't knock out your signal for longer than a few minutes, unless it's really severe weather. You might want to have a service call to check the wiring for possible shorts.

BTW I work for DirecTV so PM me if you need specific directions (no, I won't give you any freebies).

Nathan

 

[Claus]

i've had cable. if you had the choice between bad weather every once in a while or adelphia cable believe me you would take the former.

Yeah, Adelphia is shitty service, but they are the only cable provider where I live. I'd go satellite, but when it rains in Florida, it really comes down hard. :\

 

[golem]

make sure your satellite alignment is maximized for signal quality