Faulty diseqc? How best to tell?

pnag

Hi,

I have a 90cm Triax dish with three quad LNBs, pointed at Hotbird 13E, Astra 19.1E and Astra 28.2E (in that order) - these are diseqc'd into a single cable into the sitting room, and one into the dining room. (There's also a DVB-T aerial in the mix that's diplexed along the same cable, also with a feed into the sitting room and on into the dining room.)

About three weeks after it was installed, the sitting room feed starting acting very odd, basically, almost any channel would break up and the signal fail, but I could almost always get a perfect UTV (strange, but may be important later?) Eventually, even that failed - so no signal at all and nothing on a scan. Meanwhile, the DVB-T feed here still worked fine, as did everything in the other dining room feed.

I called the chap who installed it, and despite being dubious of PC tuners, he called out. (I tested with an old Sky box and got the same result - he was sure it was the fact it was because it was going into an HTPC.)

He tested it and found the diseqc on the roof sending the feed to the sitting room was faulty, replaced it, and everything was great.

Trouble is, about 11 months later - the dining room feed now seems to be acting similarly?!? More so than just UTV I can get some other channels (mostly ITV), but no BBC, no Channel 4/E4/More4. Once again, the DVB-T feed is unaffected.

Anyone have any ideas? Any tests I can try? I've tried a different box, same result, but it's come back once or twice over the past week (regardless of hardware used) only to partially fail in the same way again?!? It's driving me crazy...

Apogee

Swap the Diseqc switches around and see if the problem persists or moves with one of the switches.

Alt. remove the switch and connect your dining room feed directly to the 28E inlet with barrel connector.

pnag

Cheers for the reply.

I'll do my best, but the problem is getting onto the roof I guess! Have you seen this kind of thing happen before, or am I imagining things? Seems odd that some channels work, others not at all.

The other thing I meant to mention was a full scan on Astra 28.2 missed a whole bunch of channels (the Beebs etc.) but pulled in some from Astra 19.2?!? Seems like it is the diseqc I guess...

Apogee

I've noticed with some switches that sometimes the isolation between ports is poor, so frequencies from Hotbird can bleed into the 28E port, and it knocks out certain channels which share the same frequencies.

The symptoms you describe match what I outline above.

pnag

Apogee - that sounds exactly it! Many thanks, I shall try just the 28.2 feed asap, or failing that, a new diseqc!

Cheers!