I fired up our VAST / UEC DSD4121 yesterday to watch the Fed election and I'm getting a good deal of signal glitching. The service is currently unwatchable.
It's been 4 years since I've given the satellite an alignment so guessing this is a good place to start but before I hop on the roof and setup the sat finder, etc. is there anything I should be looking at?
I pulled the card from receiver and gave everything a good vacuum and clean, rehit the card on reinsertion. Have pics.
Signal Quality 81% Locked Signal Level and BER fluxuate
25 second example video
Could be components failing in the box... capacitors are notorious for failure.
Other possibilities are dish/LNB alignment or something in the signal path... trees moving around in & out of the signal path will produce that effect.
The same with something on/in the LNB... spiders, ants, etc.
Water ingress or loose, corroded coax connections, etc.
Check the obvious things first .... no vegetation blocking the signal path, coax connections, LNB & dish (they often do get moved a bit out of alignment over a period of time, especially if you have high winds/storms.
If all those are OK.... most likely component failure in the decoder, although LNB intermittent failure will also show similar symptoms.
Ah man, I can only imagine how annoying and frustrating it must be to watch a channel that is doing that all the time!
Even the slightest digital/MPEG artefact annoys me to no end. Would rather watch an analogue signal with a 1000 sparklies on it.
Funny though -- how does the signal quality remain steady when the BER keeps jumping like that? I thought they were related.
This may sound silly, but also check box for ventilation and overheating -- had a box behave strangely (e.g. "no signal", "failed smartcard", etc.) one day and felt the thing was running pretty hot.
Bookmarks