Home Video Asylum

TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Home Theater systems and more.

RE: DIRECTV is a frakking nightmare

It's a dish alignment issue. The more satellites thay put up, the more exacting the pointing has become. At the same time, the less skilled the techs that they send to your house have become. That being said, once they get it right, you should only lose signal during the heaviest downpours and then for about five minutes (in DC the summer can have monsterous thunderstorms and I've had about two five minute drops all summer).

When you talk to retention, make sure you complain about the capability of the techs and make sure they send the "A Team" next time. Not everybody has time for this, but I find it's useful to have more knowledge than all but the best techs--head on over to DBSTalk.com for the crash course and to keep up with what the system is capable of.

I've thrown multiple techs out of my house and my parents house--one insisted that the local channels came in on the 119 satellite, one wanted to move my dish onto my screened in porch roof from the rock solid mounting on the side of my house (after some Q&A I discover he does not have a masonry drill) and one wouldn't switch out a fried multiswitch without screwing with the (well pointee) dish first (they go through the idiots checklist and have a hard time starting at "D" without first screwing with "A" even though "A" isn't the problem).

There are some A teamers out there though and you will know it when they are at your house--get their cards when they are there! It's a damned good system when you get it right. I've got four DVRs networked and can pull anything off any of them from any of seven locations in the house. That always shuts the FIOS guys up when they push their 200GB "whole-home" DVR--I've got nearly 2 TB of space networked together.

Good luck!


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