DirecTV technical help needed

May 6, 2008 8:02 AM

Somewhat technical question about DirecTV equipment. Any DirecTV aficionados in the house?

I have ONE DirecTV box (this model). We just moved to another state, so I uprooted my DirecTV simple round dish and installed it at the new location (I decided not to do the movers connection as I figured they'd yoke me to a contract). This dish used to get my DirecTV programming the Dallas local channels just fine, but after I "registered" the new location with DirecTV, I lost all my local channels except for something called "Ion" on 62. I worked with a DirecTV representative, and not only will the box fail to get the new channels; we found the DirecTV signal meter cannot even be scrolled out of any satellite except 101.

So the agent says I will need a 3 LNB unit. He said it would be free and they'd send an installer over. So the installer shows up. The installer wants $75 for a pole mount. No, I'm not paying $75 for a pole when there's a perfectly good oak stump outside that I'm using, and I don't want a dish stuck to the house. I asked him to just leave the equipment, and he said no, he's responsible for it. Sigh. I declined the install, and he left. So I'm going to finish the job or give up.

Anyway I want to clarify a couple of issues:

* How does hooking up ONE DirecTV box to an oval 3 LNB unit instead of a round 1 LNB improve my reception? Would this actually give me access to other local channel spot beams? I thought 3 LNBs were designed for 3 receivers in a house.

* Should I just order a 3 LNB off eBay? Do these require any kind of complicated adjustments like polarity, etc, or is it just point and go?

posted by crapmatic to technology (6 comments total)

Also if DirecTV has 3 birds in the sky, I was thinking maybe I could point the dish to one of the other birds and get the necessary spot beam. Is this a possibility? Or is there just one satellite?
posted by crapmatic at 8:03 AM on May 6

I am by NO means a satellite afficionado, but my understanding was always that the LNBs had nothing to do with the # of the receivers and instead corresponded to the individual satellites they received feeds from (101,110, and 119). It could very well be that you need to connect to one of those satellite feeds for your regular programming and another for the local channels. Then again we recently cancelled our satellite programming because their tech support was a bunch of smoke and mirrors with very little help so I can't really give you any straight answers on how any of it works.
posted by genial at 8:27 AM on May 6

With the DTV system, different local chanels are beamed down from different satellites. Probably at your old house the locals and the regular channels came from the same bird so you only needed a 1 LNB dish. Your new place must have locals on a different bird than the main channels, so you need a multiple LNB dish to pick them up. Multiple LNB dishes let you merge the signals from multiple satellites into one stream that goes into your receiver. 3 LNB dishes also support more recievers (4 vs 2) than single-LNB dishes, but you won't need that feature.

The dish is a little more complex to set up as it requires proper pointing plus proper tilt, but it isn't demonstrably more difficult than pointing a single LNB dish, it just takes a little more time to tweak. If you have a compass and 15 minutes to spare, you should be able to do it without too much difficulty.
posted by jtfowl0 at 8:35 AM on May 6

The 3 LNB dish, as jtfowl0 says, allows you to see content from the newer satellites.

I'm not sure if the installation techs work under a different set of rules than the "Extended Support" (or something like that) techs, but my support contract clearly states that dishes anchored to anything other than a stationary, man-made object are not covered. That would include your stump, but is apparently often invoked for RVs.

Actually, 5 LNB is the current standard, not 3 LNB. 5 LNB dishes allow you to receive HD content from the newest satellite, and I believe they have moved some local stations to that platform as well.

If you're considering getting a new dish, I'd skip 3 LNB - it will soon be out-moded.
posted by CaptApollo at 11:26 AM on May 6

Call DirecTV and tell them you want to do the install yourself. They should be willing to send you the equipment for you to do a self-install.
posted by fengshui at 3:32 PM on May 6

Thanks all... guess this thread is buried but I want to report that I picked up a 3 LNB dish for $25 locally off Craigslist and installed it with no problems. I pointed it in the general direction my old dish pointed at, and all 3 satellites came in right away with almost no tweaking. Local channels are fine again. The stump continues doing its duty.
posted by crapmatic at 9:09 PM on May 6