# HD Dish requirement in Portland, Or Area



## chrisjs (Feb 8, 2006)

Just wondering if the dish 1000 will pick up all required HD content in the Portland area? Or will 2 dishes be required. Haven't seen any posts from this area. Just got my 622 yesterday and install is set for the 25th. (no HDMI cables by the way) I am running SD on my sets now with a dish 500, am waiting for the new 1080ps due out this summer. I have a projector to play with that has DVI and 1080i capability that I use on the weekends. So I will probably just stay with OTA until this summer, but I want to make sure the dish works while the installer is here.

Thanks


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## Rogueone (Jan 29, 2004)

there are only a few areas the 1000 doesn't work for, and they are on the east coast, and likely alaska and hawaii

the only concern I've seen is signal strength for 129 is a bit low everywhere, and maybe a tiny bit worse up there. but no reason you should been more than one dish unless you want internationals or something off 148, or SkyAngel.


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## pdxsam (Jun 20, 2004)

chrisjs said:


> Just wondering if the dish 1000 will pick up all required HD content in the Portland area? Or will 2 dishes be required.
> Thanks


I've got an install this afternoon I'll post back with what's installed.

Sam

Update: Installer was here ... had the Dish 1000... went for the install and didn't have very high signals on 
129 with the Dish 1000. He put the 500 back and repointed my 148 dish to 129 and the signal strength was much higher. He said he's been seeing a lot of this with the 1000 in the area. I'm getting between 62 and 75 with the 500 pointed to 129. Signals were much lower with the 1000.


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## chrisjs (Feb 8, 2006)

Sam, so you are able to get all HD content with just one dish 500 pointed at 129? Also do you have a single coax coming from your dish 500 to your 622? Did the installer put in a splitter?

Thanx
Chris


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## pdxsam (Jun 20, 2004)

chrisjs said:


> Sam, so you are able to get all HD content with just one dish 500 pointed at 129? Also do you have a single coax coming from your dish 500 to your 622? Did the installer put in a splitter?
> 
> Thanx
> Chris


I have two 500's one pointed at 129 and the other at 119/110.

I've got a DPP 44 switch because I have 4 physical receivers hooked up.

I get all the HD content I'm allowed to get.

Sam


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## Larry Caldwell (Apr 4, 2005)

chrisjs said:


> Just wondering if the dish 1000 will pick up all required HD content in the Portland area? Or will 2 dishes be required. Haven't seen any posts from this area. Just got my 622 yesterday and install is set for the 25th. (no HDMI cables by the way) I am running SD on my sets now with a dish 500, am waiting for the new 1080ps due out this summer. I have a projector to play with that has DVI and 1080i capability that I use on the weekends. So I will probably just stay with OTA until this summer, but I want to make sure the dish works while the installer is here.
> 
> Thanks


I haven't heard that Dish is planning HD locals in the Portland area, so you will be stuck with OTA locals for the forseeable future, probably a couple of years. A Dish 1000 will get most of the programming available. The other satellite you could look at would be 148. The easiest way to get that would be to add a Dish 300 with a DishPro LNB and a switch, or get a Dish Pro Plus 1000 with the built-in switch. Take a look at http://www.dbstalk.com/ekb/148list.htm to see if there is anything there you can't live without.


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## lujan (Feb 10, 2004)

Larry Caldwell said:


> ... http://www.dbstalk.com/ekb/148list.htm ...


Do you know if the RED text indicates that they are testing it and it is not currently available? I live in a city that has the RED text on this page. I'm referring to the 129 list.


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## Rob Glasser (Feb 22, 2005)

A lot of people are having problems with a Dish1000 in Oregon and Washington, myself included. More and more people seem to be moving to a 2 dish solution to get all 3 satellites. 

Personally I have not moved there yet, mainly because I don't want 2 dishes on my roof again. I have read that a few people are not having problems, and it seems that there is a sweet spot for the Dish1000 and I may almost be there myself now.

For the past few months my signal strengths have been as follows:
110: 75 - 85
119: 85 - 95
129: 55 - 65

After some tweaking this last weekend I'm now at:
110: 75 -85
119: 90 - 125
129: 68 - 77

Here is how I tweaked (direction, elevation, and skew) everything:
1. First tuned the dish for maximum 119 signal, like the manual says.
2. Switched to 129 on the point dish screen, then tuned the dish for maximum 129 signal. I also kept track of where maximum 119 was at.
3. Switched to 110 on the point disk screen, then tuned the dish for maximum 110 signal. Again, remembering where 119 and 129 were.
4. Since 119 was really high to begin with I decided to find the sweet spot between 110 and 129, working between the 2 to optimize 129 without suffering much, if any loss, on 110. It took me the better part of an afternoon (mainly because no one was home to switch the point dish screen in the living room for me so I had to keep climbing off the roof. I had a phone next to my speakers and called from my cell phone with a bluetooth headset on so I could listen to the signal strength).

Anyways, been watching the signals the last few days, especially now that we are getting rain in the area again and I'm not seeing much in the way of normal signal loss.

However, there is still one problem, and this is where I'm hoping it something that Dish can fix. About every 45 minutes, give or take a bit (I really need to start timing it), my signal strength on 129 drops about 30 points, for no visible reason. It can be a clear sunny day and I can have 77 on my signal prior, but all of a sudden it just drops. When this happens I lose lock and I get picture loss on 129 channels. It lasts less than a minute then everything comes back. The bigger problem is when I watch a DVR even with one of these dropouts in it, my 622 locks up and I have to reboot.


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## Grandude (Oct 21, 2004)

Rob Glasser said:


> Personally I have not moved there yet, mainly because I don't want 2 dishes on my roof again. I have read that a few people are not having problems, and it seems that there is a sweet spot for the Dish1000 and I may almost be there myself now.
> 
> However, there is still one problem, and this is where I'm hoping it something that Dish can fix. About every 45 minutes, give or take a bit (I really need to start timing it), my signal strength on 129 drops about 30 points, for no visible reason. It can be a clear sunny day and I can have 77 on my signal prior, but all of a sudden it just drops. When this happens I lose lock and I get picture loss on 129 channels. It lasts less than a minute then everything comes back. The bigger problem is when I watch a DVR even with one of these dropouts in it, my 622 locks up and I have to reboot.


Sounds like a deal breaker to me. I would be very interested in finding out if the same signal drop would occur with a separate dish pointing at 129. 
As it is for you now, the DVR feature of the 622 is virtually useless. HD is what we want from a new 622 or 211 and that is primarily on 129. 
This is just one more reason why I MUST wait till this is ironed out. I am not going to commit to 18 months for something that doesn't perform as advertised. I've already been burned by the 921 fiasco.:nono2:


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## Rob Glasser (Feb 22, 2005)

Grandude said:


> Sounds like a deal breaker to me. I would be very interested in finding out if the same signal drop would occur with a separate dish pointing at 129.
> As it is for you now, the DVR feature of the 622 is virtually useless. HD is what we want from a new 622 or 211 and that is primarily on 129.
> This is just one more reason why I MUST wait till this is ironed out. I am not going to commit to 18 months for something that doesn't perform as advertised. I've already been burned by the 921 fiasco.:nono2:


The Dish1000 (129 dropouts) has nothing to do with the 622 unit itself. The 622 is light years ahead of the 921 so if your thinking about doing the $99 upgrade in April you might want to still consider it. As far as HD, there is still a considerable amount of content on 110/119, basically everything except Voom, ESPN2 HD, and Universal HD. Also, you may be able to get 61.5 from your location, if so that is another way to get the national MPEG4 channels.

I too am curious about finding out if people are seeing the dropouts if they have a second Dish pointing at 129. For those of you that do if there is anyway you could leave your receiver at the point dish screen for 129 for quite a while and see if the dropouts manifest themselves that would be great. Personally I do seem them, and it appears to be about every 45 minutes or so. It may not affect second dish users as much because the dropout may not be severe enough to actually cause loss of signal loss.


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## Cokeswigga (Jan 25, 2005)

Where can I find the peak angles for the 129 bird?

I'm thinking about loosing my 148 dish, and pointing it to 110/119 and moving the LNB over to that, 
and then using the D1000 to peak the 129 and use that dish only for 129.

I dont't like the low signal levels, and I have had it less than 1 day and experienced several drops already... and TODAY IS CLEAR SKYS AND SUNNY!


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## Pala66 (Dec 8, 2003)

Rob Glasser said:


> The Dish1000 (129 dropouts) has nothing to do with the 622 unit itself. The 622 is light years ahead of the 921 so if your thinking about doing the $99 upgrade in April you might want to still consider it. As far as HD, there is still a considerable amount of content on 110/119, basically everything except Voom, ESPN2 HD, and Universal HD. Also, you may be able to get 61.5 from your location, if so that is another way to get the national MPEG4 channels.
> 
> I too am curious about finding out if people are seeing the dropouts if they have a second Dish pointing at 129. For those of you that do if there is anyway you could leave your receiver at the point dish screen for 129 for quite a while and see if the dropouts manifest themselves that would be great. Personally I do seem them, and it appears to be about every 45 minutes or so. It may not affect second dish users as much because the dropout may not be severe enough to actually cause loss of signal loss.


Hi Rob I live in Mountlake Terrace, WA about 12miles north of Seattle I have three dish 500's first one is 110/119 second one is the 148 wing and the third is 129 all of my LNB's are DP twins (for cosmetic reasons on the wings) running through a DDP44 switch. The 129 dish was added to the system back when testing first began on 129 for the Voom's the signal was pretty stable for about the first 6 to 8 weeks but was still low I could not get any better than 65 on transponder 30 which seems to be the worst for me. After getting tired of it dropping out for no reason rain or shine I went back up on the roof and spent about 2hrs fine tuning it in the evening because that seems to be when it drops out the most. I was able to get it to 73 but after monitoring it over the past week or so I'm seeing the same thing you are with 20+DB drop's for no reason it seems to happen at least once an hour hopefully they do something about this soon as very irritating as I like to watch Rave.


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## dale2345 (Mar 19, 2005)

Rob Glasser said:


> The Dish1000 (129 dropouts) has nothing to do with the 622 unit itself. The 622 is light years ahead of the 921 so if your thinking about doing the $99 upgrade in April you might want to still consider it. As far as HD, there is still a considerable amount of content on 110/119, basically everything except Voom, ESPN2 HD, and Universal HD. Also, you may be able to get 61.5 from your location, if so that is another way to get the national MPEG4 channels.
> 
> I too am curious about finding out if people are seeing the dropouts if they have a second Dish pointing at 129. For those of you that do if there is anyway you could leave your receiver at the point dish screen for 129 for quite a while and see if the dropouts manifest themselves that would be great. Personally I do seem them, and it appears to be about every 45 minutes or so. It may not affect second dish users as much because the dropout may not be severe enough to actually cause loss of signal loss.


Back in November 2005 I purchased a Dish 942 and had a Dish 1000 installed by a Dish employee. As soon as he left I found that the Voom channels were frequently exhibiting pixillation and freezing of the entire picture. I checked the point Dish screen and the signals on 129 transponders ranged from 55 to 67.

I called a Dish tech the next day and they sent out another Dish employee to realign the Dish 1000. This hardly helped at all with the transponders on 129 ranging from 61 to 69. Next I hired someone to install a Dish 500 which was left over from my previous use and they transferred the appropriate LNBF from the Dish 1000 to the Dish 500.

I now get readings (in good times) like 2-72, 3-70, 4-71, 5-69, 6-83, 7-72, 8-68, 9-81, 10-X, 11-68, 12-83, 13-65, 14-73, 15-73, 16-75, 17-69, 18-72, 19-66, 20-75, 21-65, 23-71, 24-73, 27-71, 30-73, 31-77. HOWEVER, when I watch a program on 129 like Rave's Soundstage I get periodic signal loss of up to 25-30 points. This can happen in clear, sunny, windless days.

Last Sunday I set the Dish 942 at 6-1-1 "Point Dish" and recorded the readings continuously for 2 hours, first on the Dish 942 hard drive and then transferred to DVD with a DVD recorder. I reviewed the readings then and will list 1 hour of them here. The readings I am listing here are @ every minute except for the signal dropping situations where they are every 30 seconds. The signals are for Transponder 30, Satellite 129. The signal at the beginning was 64.

0 minutes -64, 1-73, 2-71, 3-69, 4-70, 5-73, 6-69, 6'30"-63, 7-66, 7'30"-68, 8-70, 9-73, 10-73, 11-74, 12-73, 13-73, 14-71, 15-70, 16-70, 17-70, 18-70, 19-71, 20-72, 21-73, 22-70, 22'30"-64, 23-58, 23'30"-65, 24-69, 25-72, 26-72, 27-71, 28-70, 29-70, 30-69, 31-70, 32-70, 33-70, 34-72, 35-73, 36-71, 37-69, 37'30"-67, 38-65, 38'30"-63, 39-61, 39'30"-58, 40-54, 40'30"-50, 41-62, 41'30"-68, 42-70, 43-71, 44-69, 45-68, 46-68, 47-68, 48-69, 49-69, 50-68, 51-69, 52-68, 53-68, 54-68, 55-68, 56-68, 57-68, 58-67, 59-67, 60-67, 61-67, 62-67, 63-65, 64-65, 65-65, 66-65, 67-65, 68-65, 69-64, 69'30"-62, 70-59, 70'30"-55, 71-49, 71'30"-55, 72-63, 73-72.
The readings for the next hour were similar.


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## Rob Glasser (Feb 22, 2005)

I have started a poll on the general Dish Discussion forum about 129 signal drops, everyone, please take a moment to answer the poll and briefly indicate your setup and drops. Thank you

http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=53697


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