# DIRECTV Reception Problems in Poor Weather



## Cessnafixer42

I am getting rid of DirectTV as quickly as I can. Weather is forever a problem. We lose signal when the sirens in town are signaling tornado warnings, we lost signal last night for several hours, and the radio told us about flash flood warnings. This is a singularly useless system and technology. If you have perfect weather, then fine. If you are in the Midwest, then junk it. Period. DirectTV is worthless, the sales reps lie to you about the reliability, and all the people online who talk about "never have a problem" are all company shills. I am so profoundly sorry that I ever bought into this service, and I will scrap this sorry system ASAP. I will not hesitate in telling people to Run, Run Away Fast, Never Ever Ever install Direct TV as your service. The theory is great, but the practical installation is utterly worthless. And Tech Support is Shocked, I tell you, Utterly Shocked to hear that weather interferes with their signal. Liars, all of them. I had fiber to the house in the town I lived in before, and I am so profoundly saddened that I have been conned into buying into satellite technology in this town, a non-fiber-wired down. Bad technology. Maybe useful in the middle of nowhere, for places that will never be wired, but if you have any ground based alternatives at all, take them, You'll be profoundly better off. Oh, pay attention to the fact that once DirectTV has you hooked, they require a 48-month "disconnect fee" That's called blackmail, because they know their technology is not any damn good.


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## inkahauts

I wood we how often you checked to see if you had access to SD channels and what your signals are and if you need a better alignment. Everyone pretty much knows if it's truly terrible weather you will lose signal though.


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## slice1900

You have a problem with your install, I'm in the midwest and have never once lost signal for "hours". When a big storm blows through sure you lose signal, but it is only the really big ones, just a normal rainstorm doesn't affect it at all.

But if you've have Directv out to fix it and they haven't done it, then you may as well switch since you obviously aren't happy. I have a feeling before long you'll be looking for a place to rant about problems with your cable system.


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## James Long

Also note that the commitment is 24 months (two years) not "48 months" and the disconnect fee is pre-rated based on the number of months left in the commitments.


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## MysteryMan

Cessnafixer42 said:


> I am getting rid of DirectTV as quickly as I can. Weather is forever a problem. We lose signal when the sirens in town are signaling tornado warnings, we lost signal last night for several hours, and the radio told us about flash flood warnings. This is a singularly useless system and technology. If you have perfect weather, then fine. If you are in the Midwest, then junk it. Period. DirectTV is worthless, the sales reps lie to you about the reliability, and all the people online who talk about "never have a problem" are all company shills. I am so profoundly sorry that I ever bought into this service, and I will scrap this sorry system ASAP. I will not hesitate in telling people to Run, Run Away Fast, Never Ever Ever install Direct TV as your service. The theory is great, but the practical installation is utterly worthless. And Tech Support is Shocked, I tell you, Utterly Shocked to hear that weather interferes with their signal. Liars, all of them. I had fiber to the house in the town I lived in before, and I am so profoundly saddened that I have been conned into buying into satellite technology in this town, a non-fiber-wired down. Bad technology. Maybe useful in the middle of nowhere, for places that will never be wired, but if you have any ground based alternatives at all, take them, You'll be profoundly better off. Oh, pay attention to the fact that once DirectTV has you hooked, they require a 48-month "disconnect fee" That's called blackmail, because they know their technology is not any damn good.


I disagree with your attitude towards DIRECTV. I've been a DIRECTV customer for twenty years. During that time there were a few issues that needed to be addressed but they were always resolved to my satisfaction. Your post indicates you are thinking with your emotions instead of using logic. Try looking for cause instead of placing blame. I and others have experienced rain/snow fade but nothing as drastic as you describe. Like slice1900 stated, there's something wrong with your install.


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## camo

I'm in the Midwest, Nebraska. Tornadoes and big thunderstorms are common and may knock transmission signal out for a few minutes, but anyone living here without a weather alert radio is crazy. I would never rely on TV as my source of emergency alerts. Reminds me of the Weather Channel saying how many lives they save and we need their channel. Seriously do people really rely on television? If you do good luck when a real emergency occurs.


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## jsk

Threaten to cancel if they can't figure out why you lose signal frequently during bad weather. I have Dish and I rarely lose signal and when I started having problems, I called, they sent someone over and fixed the problem (it was water getting trapped in the LNBs). You should have the same experience with DirecTV.

If you go to cable, when it is out, it will be out for hours, the satellite should only go out for about 15 min. in really bad weather. Also, you might want to get the OTA module (or whatever DirecTV calls it) so you can get local OTA channels as a backup during bad weather.


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## mke

My signal use to go out for a few min when there was a bad storm on dtv and now it could be a very bad storm and never goes out it seems it happened when they launched the new satiites. I was wondering did that also increase the signal strength?


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## TANK

I live in Central Florida and have a been D* sub since 1998. I have never had a long loss of signal except one year from a hurricane. This year we have had rain storms almost every day since the first of the year( not the usual pop up rain storms we get during the summer ).

The storms are dumping inches of rain - that is a wall of hard rain falling. The loss of signal only lasts a few minutes and at the most 20 minutes. These storms can be seen on radar moving in from the south west- the same direction as the sat dish is pointed.


Cessnafixer42- I would also suggest that you get D* to check your install out , it sounds like your problems are from a a bad installation.


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## AntAltMike

The OP seems to have a defective installation of some sort. If such a problem history were posted a decade ago, it would have been appropriate for others who are familiar with the hardware to guide him in diagnosing and remedying it, but that was back when many satellite TV subscribers were hobbyists.

I don't doubt that someone could diagnose and remedy whatever system deficiency is leaving this poster's system performance vulnerable to seemingly commonplace atmospheric signal degradation, but I cannot tell from the post what he has done to try to get the problem remedied.

All television service providers have occasional difficulty servicing intermittent failures which cannot be made to occur during a technician's visit, and quite often, a technician issues a report saying that there was nothing found to be wrong with the system during his visit, and that is often true. Unfortunately, that doesn't help the customer when the problem recurs.

I suggest that he keep a log of his outages, making periodic record the time and signal strength of a problem CONUS and Spot transponder and intervals of perhaps ten minutes until they both are back on. In other words, he could say that CNN broke up at 8:10 AM, and measured 78% at that time, 70% at 8:20 AM, 40% or no signal at 8:30, etc, and so on until it came back on, and then present that log to DirecTV. If they won't do anything in response to that, then yeah, it is time to jump ship, with copies of your correspondence being prominently addressed to the office of his state attorney General and utility commission, but I don't think it will come to that.


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## PCampbell

So far the OP has not come back to look at this.


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## DanG48

We can all put our 2 cents in regarding Mystery Man's problems and it seems to me if he has been with Directv since 1995 that he must of had pretty good service or he wouldn't have stuck with them as his TV provider. From what i have read from your comments that your mind is made up and Directv is useless when weather is bad. Well let me tell you, I also have been a Directv customer since 1995 and lived in Central Fl. until 2009 when I moved to Ga. In 2005 we experienced 2 major hurricanes Hurricane Charley and Frances where I live. I had no power but a generator and a house full of relatives. Wind was over 100mph and rain coming down sideways and I still was able to watch movies on Directv with very minimal outage during the worse part of the storm. My total rainfade I have had in over all my years is very minimal at least and now that I live in Ga it is allmost non-existant. Sorry about your problems Mystery Man but I feel I can't get better TV service than Directv!!!!! Just the picture quality is worth the price of a few minutes of downtime from rain. Good luck with your new TV provider....
By the way, I don't work for Directv or have any affiliation with the company. Only a loyal happy customer since 1995!!!


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## AntAltMike

Cessnafixer42 said:


> I am getting rid of DirectTV as quickly as I can. Weather is forever a problem.





MysteryMan said:


> I disagree with your attitude towards DIRECTV. I've been a DIRECTV customer for twenty years. During that time there were a few issues that needed to be addressed but they were always resolved to my satisfaction. Your post indicates you are thinking with your emotions instead of using logic. Try looking for cause instead of placing blame. I and others have experienced rain/snow fade but nothing as drastic as you describe. Like slice1900 stated, there's something wrong with your install.





PCampbell said:


> So far the OP has not come back to look at this.





DanG48 said:


> We can all put our 2 cents in regarding Mystery Man's problems and it seems to me if he has been with Directv since 1995 that he must of had pretty good service or he wouldn't have stuck with them as his TV provider. From what i have read from your comments that your mind is made up and Directv is useless when weather is bad.





> What we have here is a failure to communicate.


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## MysteryMan

DanG48 said:


> We can all put our 2 cents in regarding Mystery Man's problems and it seems to me if he has been with Directv since 1995 that he must of had pretty good service or he wouldn't have stuck with them as his TV provider. From what i have read from your comments that your mind is made up and Directv is useless when weather is bad. Well let me tell you, I also have been a Directv customer since 1995 and lived in Central Fl. until 2009 when I moved to Ga. In 2005 we experienced 2 major hurricanes Hurricane Charley and Frances where I live. I had no power but a generator and a house full of relatives. Wind was over 100mph and rain coming down sideways and I still was able to watch movies on Directv with very minimal outage during the worse part of the storm. My total rainfade I have had in over all my years is very minimal at least and now that I live in Ga it is allmost non-existant. Sorry about your problems Mystery Man but I feel I can't get better TV service than Directv!!!!! Just the picture quality is worth the price of a few minutes of downtime from rain. Good luck with your new TV provider....
> By the way, I don't work for Directv or have any affiliation with the company. Only a loyal happy customer since 1995!!!


Reread the thread. Cessnafixer42 is the one with the problems, not me.


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## DanG48

MysteryMan said:


> Reread the thread. Cessnafixer42 is the one with the problems, not me.


Sorry about that MysteryMan. I didn't read the post very well my bad...DanG48


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## Herdfan

Cessnafixer42 said:


> I am getting rid of DirectTV as quickly as I can. Weather is forever a problem. We lose signal when the sirens in town are signaling tornado warnings, we lost signal last night for several hours, and the radio told us about flash flood warnings. This is a singularly useless system and technology.


There are over 35 million satellite customers in the USA. If it was worthless, there would not be anywhere near that many.

You need to call and have your dish repointed. If the weather radar is not showing red over your house, you should not lose signal.


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