That’s one of my pet peeves. It’s very frustrating to get someone in tech support who a) has no knowledge at all other than what’s on the checklist in front of them and b) certainly doesn’t know as much as you do, particularly when it comes to first principles or logic and c) doesn’t know that they don’t know, and answer your questions with gibberish, often in a condescending way as though you’re the idiot.

This happens all too frequently, and it happened again today with DirecTV.

I’ve got a weird problem. Intermittently, I’ll lose signal on some channels, starting with pixelation and audio breakup, deteriorating into complete loss of satellite signal. The last time I was having a problem like that, in California, it turned out to be a bad LNB, so I went out and bought a new one, and installed it.

The problem persists. Now here’s the really strange part.

When I run a test on the individual transponders while it’s acting up, the odd-numbered ones are fine, with signal strengths in the nineties. The even-numbered ones are zero across the board. What kind of failure would cause this kind of selective behavior? What’s different between odd-numbered and even-numbered transponders that would cause one to be fine and the other useless? I thought it might be something in the logic programming of the receiver, but I hooked another one up, and saw exactly the same behavior.

It seemed like an intriguing problem to me, and I figured that if I talked to DirecTV about it, they’d have some kind of ready explanation. And indeed they might, if you could actually talk to someone who understands how the system works, instead of a drone with a checklist, who not only couldn’t explain it, but didn’t seem to think it remarkable. He simply kept leading me through his check list. When I explained to him that even was bad and odd was good, he could only repeat, “that means it’s seeking signal,” as though that actually meant something significant and useful.

The bottom line was that he said he’d send someone out to look at it. On October 12th. I’m tempted to make another attempt to see if this time I can at least get someone with a little intellectual curiousity, and ability to think, but I’m wondering if anyone out there has any insight.

It’s not the receiver, it’s not the LNB. It could be dish aim, but the problem with this, as with all hypotheses, is that it doesn’t explain why I have a perfect signal on odd transponders and zero on the evens. Same thing with a bad cable, which is the only other thing that I can try at my end.

If someone described the symptoms to me, and I had no other knowledge, my first guess was a problem with the transponders on the satellite itself. But that implies that everyone else would be having the same problem, and it’s hard to imagine that occurring for long without DirecTV doing something about it.

Anyway, I guess I’ll try swapping cables, just because there’s nothing else I haven’t tried, but if that’s the problem, I’ll be very interested to understand what kind of cable failure would affect half the transponders, and only those with even numbers.

[Update on Sunday morning]

Thanks for the input. I finally did get in touch with someone at DirecTV who knew what they were talking about, and he told me that the most common reason for this behavior was cabling, with receiver second, and LNB a distant third. He couldn’t explain the physics of it, but said that in his experience, it was usually a bent pin on a cable, or some similar problem.

I went out this morning, and started tracing the wire. I found a corroded connector where it goes into the house on the active line. When I moved it to the other side (on a line we aren’t currently using), which wasn’t corroded, the problem seems to have gone away. I’ll have to watch for a while to see if it recurs, but that looks like it was the culprit. I’ll have to go to Home Depot and get a replacement for it, and seal it back up out of the weather (it only had electrical tape wrapped around it, which is probably why it went south).