Global Reset

I’d actually almost forgotten that you can’t just split the signal off the dish, you actually need 4 connectors. I found out that you can get the Triple-LNB dish off eBay for $12. I spent another $15 in shipping, but that still beats Best Buy’s price for the Triple-LNB ($60) or the 2x4 multi-switch ($70). The main reason I went with the Triple-LNB upgrade was to keep my options open for HDTV, should I decide on a TV upgrade in the next couple of years.

Typically, I don’t read directions. It’s my job as an Engineer to figure things out… So, as any good Engineer would, I play with something until it’s broken, then I read the directions only to get it working again. I get sour looks from Nicole for this, so I decided to follow all of the directions for setting up the dish. Last time, I just pointed the dish the same way the neighbors were pointing it, and just fudged around with it until I had a good signal strength on one transponder. Never looked at a single line of instruction for how to do it, just figured it out. This time, I started off by using a level to make sure that my dish mast was standing straight up (it wasn’t even close to straight before)… Then, I adjusted the tilt setting to the appropriate level for my little region of Earth (I had zero tilt on the previous dish). I used the recommended Elevation and Azimuth settings and I was pretty much good to go. I had to make a 1 degree adjustment to Elevation and about a 3 degree adjustment to Azimuth, and my signal strength looked pretty good… And it took me a lot less time than my previous effort. It’s amazing when directions actually help. :)

There is, however, one kink in that plan… I probably spent a little under an hour of fine-tuning when I did my directionless install… I spent over two hours fine-tuning with the help of the directions thanks to one poorly worded instruction. The directions actually stated that when fine tuning, you should check all transponders and ensure that all transponders have a signal strength greater than 70. So, as a good little direction-follower, I attempted this. However, there were four transponders on which I couldn’t get a signal at all: 4, 18, 26, 28. After two hours of trying every tweak I could think of to adjust the position and direction of the dish, I finally searched the internet to see if I could find a correlation between these transponder numbers. Turns out, they are spot beams, which are only directed at certain areas of the United States… Certain areas that I don’t live in. This is how DirecTV delivers your local channels to you, so that you can get your nearest metro’s version of the local news. So, I’ve learned my lesson about following directions!

As far as I can tell, the R10 unit (the only unit which is free with this promotion) is not hackable without resoldering a PROM chip, so I think I’ll leave this one in factory condition. In any case, I’ve had my hacked HDVR2 unit for quite a while now, but I figured it’d be nice to have a non-hacked unit as well. Ever since I did the 4.0 upgrade to my HDVR2, I lost those little showcases. I know some find them annoying, but I liked the TiVo recommendations and the movie guides sorted by genre. If I didn’t have anything good to watch, I enjoyed surfing through that TiVolution magazine and seeing if I could find something interesting. Beats the hell out of the old days of actually channel surfing (who does that anymore??)…

Which reminds me… Having two TiVo’s has rekindled my love affair with my Logitech Harmony 680 remote. I can’t imagine a better home theatre remote control. I did have to finagle her into grokking the remote control addresses for the two different TiVo’s (bless her heart!). I don’t know why they don’t add it as an option to their user interface, but a quick search online said that you had to actually call customer support and they could adjust your remote configuration file for you. I don’t enjoy waiting on hold, so I toyed around with it until I figured out I could use the “code learning” feature to change the remote address for each remote. To initiate this, select the “troubleshoot” option for each device and select the “My PVR doesn’t understand any command from my remote”. This will start up an app to help “learn” the device’s correct IR codes. You just send it a TiVo button, a channel down, and a select, and the software figures out automatically which address you’re using (so you don’t have to re-send all of the buttons). Of interest to Mac OSX users: the Logitech Harmony 680 is completely Mac OSX compatible.