# Rain and watching Recorded shows



## eddieras (Aug 31, 2007)

why is it that when i'm watching recorded shows i keep getting the "sat signal has been lost' error message during a storm?? this is so ridiculous - i can understand not being able to watch live tv during inclement weather -but not being able to watch recorded shows?? is there some setting i can do to eliminate these stupid pop up error messages??


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## SayWhat? (Jun 7, 2009)

You're getting that because of rain fade during the timer the program was being recorded. Nothing was recorded, so there's nothing to play back.


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## eddieras (Aug 31, 2007)

SayWhat? said:


> You're getting that because of rain fade during the timer the program was being recorded. Nothing was recorded, so there's nothing to play back.


no- this show was recorded the other night - when it was clear out --last night we had bad storms- in fact, when the lost signal came up if i hit the channel guide button the guide pops up and the video of the recorded show still was playing in the small window. with rain fade you get a different message -small window with 'part of the signal lost' plus the picture breaks up and is very obvious. this was nearly a full screen message and the picture before and after the message (and during if i opened guide) was perfect.

i know what rain fade is - i've had a pvr and sat system for years - going back to primestar and replaytv, followed by directv, tivo and now dish.


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## ChuckA (Feb 7, 2006)

Yes, it's a small pain in the ass, but much better than not being able to watch anything at all. It sure beats sitting there listening to the weather radio.


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## 4HiMarks (Jan 21, 2004)

No, I agree with the OP. There is absolutely NO REASON for a lost signal message (of any kind) to appear when you are watching a recording. The tuners shouldn't even need to be hooked up to a dish. 

It's like watching a video tape and your VCR starts complaining that the OTA signal is lost. Who cares? I'm not watching or recording it right now.


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## NTIMID8 (Sep 17, 2005)

I have the same ***** and on top of that the continuous error message that pop up watching OTA. Echo really needs to divorce OTA and pre recorded material from that sat acquisition routine.


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## eddieras (Aug 31, 2007)

ChuckA said:


> Yes, it's a small pain in the ass, but much better than not being able to watch anything at all. It sure beats sitting there listening to the weather radio.


not sure it's _much_ better - was pretty frustrating last nite trying to watch chevy chase in NL Vacation! :grin: 
i was seriously thinking of just unhooking the line to the sat - tho that probably would have pissed off the machine even more!

seriously - watching a recorded show should not have any bearing on the weather. should be two independent things...

so there's not a setting or something to avoid this?


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## ChuckA (Feb 7, 2006)

Not sure how often you saw the problem. When this has occurred to me in the past I only remember seeing the error message once or twice in an hour long recording. Like I said, a pain but nothing I am going to complain about given it happens to us only a couple of times a year. Not a big deal as far as I am concerned. I'm sure if I lived somewhere bad weather was more of a problem I'd complain about it or move (because of the weather not because of a TV show).


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## thrillerbee (Aug 13, 2007)

eddieras said:


> no- this show was recorded the other night - when it was clear out --last night we had bad storms- in fact, when the lost signal came up if i hit the channel guide button the guide pops up and the video of the recorded show still was playing in the small window. with rain fade you get a different message -small window with 'part of the signal lost' plus the picture breaks up and is very obvious. this was nearly a full screen message and the picture before and after the message (and during if i opened guide) was perfect.
> 
> i know what rain fade is - i've had a pvr and sat system for years - going back to primestar and replaytv, followed by directv, tivo and now dish.


I've been having the same problem & it's incredibly irritating. I spoke with a support rep last night & they said they'd pass the info on to their engineering dept but wouldn't be able to let me know what they found/didn't find. Oh well... this kind of crap frustrates me to no end.


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## ShapeShifter (Apr 21, 2008)

ChuckA said:


> Not sure how often you saw the problem. When this has occurred to me in the past I only remember seeing the error message once or twice in an hour long recording.


This past weekend I saw it more than a dozen times during a one hour show! Every five to 10 minutes the alert would pop up, and would not clear on its own, but would clear as soon as I pressed a button like guide, DVR, or menu. It definitely wasn't a loss during the recording phase, as the recording would still be running while the alert was up, and I could skip back and watch the part I had just missed (without the alert popping back up at that location.)

The really frustrating part was that as the show was reaching a climax, the alerts were getting more and more frequent -- in the last five minutes of the show there were a couple times where the alert was coming up every 10 to 20 seconds! It seemed that as soon as I cleared the alert and got back to the show, the alert would pop up again. And this was while the rain was letting up!

I was in my motorhome at the time, and I have an A/B switch to select between the portable ground dish I was using at the time and the rooftop dome that I didn't have turned on. So thinking that it was a matter of the signal fading in and out, I flipped the switch over to the dome, forcing the receiver to have no signal. I figured if it never reacquired the signal, then it wouldn't complain about losing it again. Wrong. I still got multiple lost signal alerts.

I agree with the others. There's no reason to interrupt a recording playback with lost signal alerts. The second TV output was off, and there was nothing being recorded on either tuner. There's no reason that a loss of signal on either tuner was important enough to interrupt the playback session.


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## AED55 (Oct 2, 2008)

Just a guess, but could this be a ploy by DN to discourage one from taking their receiver to another location to watch recorded programs?


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## SaltiDawg (Aug 30, 2004)

AED55 said:


> Just a guess, but could this be a ploy by DN to discourage one from taking their receiver to another location to watch recorded programs?


I think that I am confused.

Are we saying that we have an existing perfectly good recording with no signal losses that we decide to view because the current *live* satellite feed is being lost and regained to to weather?

*And* while watching this flawless recording you see pop-ups alerting you to current real-time signal losses?


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## ShapeShifter (Apr 21, 2008)

AED55 said:


> Just a guess, but could this be a ploy by DN to discourage one from taking their receiver to another location to watch recorded programs?


Yeah, right. How would the receiver know? And why would it only do it during rainy weather? And what about the three other people complaining about the same thing? I fail to see how that comment is the least bit constructive or helpful.



SaltiDawg said:


> I think that I am confused.
> 
> Are we saying that we have an existing perfectly good recording with no signal losses that we decide to view because the current *live* satellite feed is being lost and regained to to weather?
> 
> *And* while watching this flawless recording you see pop-ups alerting you to current real-time signal losses?


Exactly! You are not confused. And I'm sure the recording was good because I could back up to where the alert popped up and watch it again, uninterrupted.


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## AED55 (Oct 2, 2008)

ShapeShifter said:


> Yeah, right. How would the receiver know? And why would it only do it during rainy weather? And what about the three other people complaining about the same thing? I fail to see how that comment is the least bit constructive or helpful.


No need for the condescending reply ShapeShifter. I don't know why, but for some reason I always assumed you had to be connected to an active satellite input in order to view recorded programs. Obviously this is incorrect, since I just tried it.

I'm not clear, is this problem inherent to all 722's? If so, than why can I disconnect and reconnect the dish input during DVR playback and no error message appears. Isn't this basically simulating the same loss of signal that occurs due to weather issues?


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## SaltiDawg (Aug 30, 2004)

AED55 said:


> No need for the condescending reply ShapeShifter. I don't know why, but for some reason I always assumed you had to be connected to an active satellite input in order to view recorded programs. Obviously this is incorrect, since I just tried it.
> 
> I'm not clear, is this problem inherent to all 722's? If so, than why can I disconnect and reconnect the dish input during DVR playback and no error message appears. Isn't this basically simulating the same loss of signal that occurs due to weather issues?


Yes, I also am confused. We have two 622's and do not get error messages due to *current* signal loss while watching *recorded* events.

We do get the pop-ups associated with signal loss and recording loss do to weather conditions *in the past* when the recording was made.


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## bigshew (Feb 26, 2007)

Have you tried resetting the receiver? I used to get those annoying popups over & over and a reset would fix it for awhile. Now that I think about it, I haven't seen the popup msg in over a month. The only change during that time is a new OTA antenna.


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## ShapeShifter (Apr 21, 2008)

AED55 said:


> No need for the condescending reply ShapeShifter. I don't know why, but for some reason I always assumed you had to be connected to an active satellite input in order to view recorded programs. Obviously this is incorrect, since I just tried it.
> 
> I'm not clear, is this problem inherent to all 722's? If so, than why can I disconnect and reconnect the dish input during DVR playback and no error message appears. Isn't this basically simulating the same loss of signal that occurs due to weather issues?


The attitude was because your comment had no bearing at all on the issue. Too many people get on their high horse and consider moving a receiver as a capital crime. I'm not giving a receiver to Uncle Joe so he can have free service at his house. I'm either home watching the service or on the road watching the service. There is no duplication of service here, and the retailer and installer were fully aware of my intentions when I signed up. Am I being overly defensive? Perhaps.

With two dish signal sources to chose from (portable dish and rooftop dome) 95% of the time I do have a valid signal. But there are occasions where there is rain fade causing temporary outages, to which I'm perhaps more susceptible to since I don't necessarily take the time to tweak the dish aim to perfection, or when using the dome the reflector is so much smaller than a real dish. Then, there are times when heavy tree cover causes no signal at all for that night, but that wasn't the situation here, although recordings play back just fine with no satellite signal when that is the case.

This was one of those times where rain fade made live watching annoying, so I switched to a recording that was made at home under ideal conditions. I've never had this happen before that night, but then it happened through two different hour long recording playbacks. It doesn't make sense why it would happen at all, and why it would happen so many times and so frequently that night.

While there appear to be no issues with playing back a recording without a signal (normally) there are issues with accessing an external hard drive without a signal. When first powering up a receiver, it will say the EHD is not authorized until it can lock onto 119 and get the authorizations codes. A minute or so after getting a live picture, the EHD suddenly works.


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## ShapeShifter (Apr 21, 2008)

bigshew said:


> Have you tried resetting the receiver? I used to get those annoying popups over & over and a reset would fix it for awhile.


You know, that didn't occur to me, although other times when strange things happen a power switch reset is my first troubleshooting step. I don't know why I didn't think of it that night. That would've been a good idea.


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## FarmerBob (Nov 28, 2002)

I had the same problem for quite a while and it was happening a lot. I called DISH and they said there was no such thing even though I gave them the actual only error message number that specifically pertains to this exact issue. Then they then went off on a tangent that had nothing to do with this. But mine was happening on perfectly clear days. So by chance one day when it happened I was able to get shots of the screen and the error messages and sent them to DISH. I got a reply that they would look into it and have not heard a word in months. BUT haven't had this happen since and there have been many opportunities for it to happen.

There are several threads in the forum that discuss this in depth with some fix-its that worked for some. You might want to do a search.


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## Michael P (Oct 27, 2004)

You can get a lost signal on a clear day if you have LNB drift. As a matter of fact I have that problem frequently, especially on one of my local HD stations. The fix is to switch to the OTA tuner (which takes the LNB out of the equation). As long as you have a good signal lock on an OTA station you should not get these interruptions during playback of a previously recorded program. 

For some unknown reason these error messages show up because the satellite tuner is on "in the background" while you are watching the recorded program. I guess the receiver is programmed to warn you about the live signal's interruption in case you wanted to switch back to the live tuner and rewind the live buffer.


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## TulsaOK (Feb 24, 2004)

Michael P said:


> You can get a lost signal on a clear day if you have LNB drift. As a matter of fact I have that problem frequently, especially on one of my local HD stations. The fix is to switch to the OTA tuner (which takes the LNB out of the equation). As long as you have a good signal lock on an OTA station you should not get these interruptions during playback of a previously recorded program.
> 
> For some unknown reason these error messages show up because the satellite tuner is on "in the background" while you are watching the recorded program. I guess the receiver is programmed to warn you about the live signal's interruption in case you wanted to switch back to the live tuner and rewind the live buffer.


I get these pop-ups when I have an OTA channel dropping out on the other tuner (Single Mode) and I'm watching a satellite channel or viewing a DVR event. I see no reason for this.


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## CABill (Mar 20, 2005)

Kent Taylor said:


> I get these pop-ups when I have an OTA channel dropping out on the other tuner (Single Mode) and I'm watching a satellite channel or viewing a DVR event. I see no reason for this.


Same thing happens in Dual mode. If the OTA tuner is on a marginal channel, it will interrupt the recorded program playback with "Sat signal lost", but the -0x channel and nothing displayed for Satellite is a clue!


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## SaltiDawg (Aug 30, 2004)

CABill said:


> Same thing happens in Dual mode. If the OTA tuner is on a marginal channel, it will interrupt the recorded program playback with "Sat signal lost", but the -0x channel and nothing displayed for Satellite is a clue!


What is odd is that my wife nor I have *never* seen any of these messages and our OTA signals are all "shakey." We operate one 622 in Single and one in Dual.


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## CABill (Mar 20, 2005)

Maybe "sub-marginal" is required to get the popup???

We were watching a program about the Who on a San Jose PBS station ( ~ 100 miles to tower) Sat night. After a while, there was a lot of macro blocking and loss of sound (kinda defeating the purpose of watching ). I saw it was going to air again at 2AM on Sun and set that to record and switched to something already recorded. I don't recall the signal strength values while it was breaking up, but I didn't get a popup until about 15 minutes later. IIRC, all I hit was the DVR button and Cancel and was back to watching the recording. Two more popups that night. If it matters, I did have the show that was breaking up set to record, but I'm reasonably sure I've seen the popups when OTA isn't being recorded. Maybe it is only when the strength goes REALLY low?

In addition to showing no Satellite in the popup, the Transponder was 03 (watching 54-03).


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## Bogey62 (Dec 1, 2002)

eddieras said:


> why is it that when i'm watching recorded shows i keep getting the "sat signal has been lost' error message during a storm?? this is so ridiculous - i can understand not being able to watch live tv during inclement weather -but not being able to watch recorded shows?? is there some setting i can do to eliminate these stupid pop up error messages??


Yes, it's ridiculous, but here's my workaround...

I tune my 722 to an OTA channel that is coming in strong and then there's no issues with the lost signal while watching prerecorded events during a rain fade period.


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## FarmerBob (Nov 28, 2002)

Bogey62 said:


> Yes, it's ridiculous, but here's my workaround...
> 
> I tune my 722 to an OTA channel that is coming in strong and then there's no issues with the lost signal while watching prerecorded events during a rain fade period.


This works if your OTA's don't dump. Many times especially the other evening, crystal clear, my 722 was dropping 98-9% OTA's all night. That's the root of my problem which is when the 722 drops perfectly good OTA's, you get the error. I have contacted DISH about this and Level 1 was dumb as a box of rocks. So I had this escalate to the "Executive Level" and supposedly they are looking into it. Lord knows that I have sent them enough screen shots to supply them with plenty of info to work with. I haven't gotten any acknowledgment that there is a problem. But they didn't say their wasn't.


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## Bogey62 (Dec 1, 2002)

FarmerBob said:


> This works if your OTA's don't dump. Many times especially the other evening, crystal clear, my 722 was dropping 98-9% OTA's all night. That's the root of my problem which is when the 722 drops perfectly good OTA's, you get the error. I have contacted DISH about this and Level 1 was dumb as a box of rocks. So I had this escalate to the "Executive Level" and supposedly they are looking into it. Lord knows that I have sent them enough screen shots to supply them with plenty of info to work with. I haven't gotten any acknowledgment that there is a problem. But they didn't say their wasn't.


Yeah, that's the first step, getting them to NOT say there isn't a problem. 

My OTA's never drop out unless it's a weak station to begin with.

Good luck, I know the frustration with this equipment first-hand. I had mondo issues with my old 721 that were never resolved even after swapping it out several times.

The thing is, Dish makes the best DVRs, warts and all.


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

FarmerBob said:


> This works if your OTA's don't dump. Many times especially the other evening, crystal clear, my 722 was dropping 98-9% OTA's all night. That's the root of my problem which is when the 722 drops perfectly good OTA's, you get the error. I have contacted DISH about this and Level 1 was dumb as a box of rocks. So I had this escalate to the "Executive Level" and supposedly they are looking into it. Lord knows that I have sent them enough screen shots to supply them with plenty of info to work with. I haven't gotten any acknowledgment that there is a problem. But they didn't say their wasn't.


First level is there to take care of the very basic of issues. The 80% type calls that Dish normally gets and are contained in their troubleshooting system. I would not expect level on to be able to deal with what you are describing FarmerBob. They are not trained for that. I would suspect Advanced Tech would even have a hard time given the nature of OTA and how issues tend to be localized.

Based on what you are describing, signal is jumping around from high to low in the past people that have described this have later found that either there is something wrong with the local stations stream data or you are running into a multi-pathing issue. Do you get this all the time or does it happen from time to time? Is it specific to one channel or multiple channels? Dish OTA does have a history of being more sensitive to multi-path issues and people have described installations where a TV tuner might work fine while Dish receivers exhibit multi-pathing conditions.

Given that the issue is OTA specific, I would not expect a lot of effort on Dish's side of the fence. Most likely will come back with you have OTA environment issues you need to have worked out.

I do see where the popping up a dialog can be annoying definitely if the problem people are seeing is intermittment, but there is also a negative to not letting the user know they have an issue with the channel. Definitely could use some smarter logic to minimize the pop-up, but I doubt we would see this dialog ever go away given it does serve a purpose of informing the user there is signal issues with an OTA channel it is tuned to. They definitely took the conservative approach here and it could use some polishing to deal when environmental conditions kick in that take out the OTA.


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## FarmerBob (Nov 28, 2002)

Bogey62 said:


> Yeah, that's the first step, getting them to NOT say there isn't a problem.
> 
> My OTA's never drop out unless it's a weak station to begin with.
> 
> Good luck, I know the frustration with this equipment first-hand. I had mondo issues with my old 721 that were never resolved even after swapping it out several times.


Thank you.



> The thing is, Dish makes the best DVRs, warts and all.


That's why we stick it out. Warts and all.


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## FarmerBob (Nov 28, 2002)

Bogey62 said:


> Yeah, that's the first step, getting them to NOT say there isn't a problem.
> 
> My OTA's never drop out unless it's a weak station to begin with.
> 
> ...





Ron Barry said:


> First level is there to take care of the very basic of issues. The 80% type calls that Dish normally gets and are contained in their troubleshooting system. I would not expect level on to be able to deal with what you are describing FarmerBob. They are not trained for that. I would suspect Advanced Tech would even have a hard time given the nature of OTA and how issues tend to be localized. _*I know that about Level 1. It's just the frustration of having to plow through them first. All my Exec Direct Numbers are inactive, so I can not call people that profess to have a little more knowledge directly anymore.*_
> 
> Based on what you are describing, signal is jumping around from high to low in the past people that have described this have later found that either there is something wrong with the local stations stream data or you are running into a multi-pathing issue. *I had a second HDTV set up with a straight OTA feed with it set on it's Station Info screen and it gives you a ton of info on that station. Nothing that would or should cause a problem. Plus what it takes to resolve the issue indicates that there is not a problem OTAwise, but that the 722 just needed a kick in the pants to bring it back from over reacting to a hiccup. *Do you get this all the time or does it happen from time to time? *This only happens every so often. But it's been enough to be severely annoying and as per the last Exec Tech I spoke with, enough to call them.* Is it specific to one channel or multiple channels?* It's completely indiscriminate.* Dish OTA does have a history of being more sensitive to multi-path issues and people have described installations where a TV tuner might work fine while Dish receivers exhibit multi-pathing conditions. *I'll bring that up when I hear back from DISH. That might be a new info that they can work with. I rather doubt that they know this on their own. It's frightening as to what they don't know.*
> 
> ...


 . . . fb


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