Question for those of you who have Dish or Direct TV

[KitchenWitch]

How often do you have outages?

[Goldmund]

1. Never

Not even during snowstorms or thunderstorms (I have DirectTV). The worst it ever got was when the antenna was totally covered with snow, and even then it was only fuzzy.

[BeTheChange]

2. Dish network... only during strong lightening storms

When we lived up in the sierras, even with feet of snow I never had outages.

[Demonaut]

3. only during severe thunderstorms or hail

and it last just a few econds or minutes at worst

[cestpaspossible]

4. If more than four inches of snow

pile up in the dish, I have to knock it off... and if there is a super intense storm passing right overhead it has gone out for a minute or so.

[Maddy McCall]

5. Directv. Never..

[mohinoaklawnillinois]

6. Very seldom, only during a severe thunderstorm in the

spring/summer or during a heavy snowfall in the winter. They only last 10 minutes at the most and then the signal comes back.

I love my satellite dish after having put up with cable for so many years. When we had cable we had outages at least twice a month and they would last for hours at a time and their customer service sucked the big one.

[KitchenWitch]

7. That is what is happening here

I think dish or direct ends up a little cheaper too.

[mohinoaklawnillinois]

11. Yeah, when we got the satellite dish in April of 2002

the bills were cheaper than cable.

However, since then we've added a few premium channels, Fox Sports Net; Mr. Wonderful is a soccer fan, and HBO for me. It's a little pricey, but I think it's worth it. The picture is far better than anything we ever got from the cable and we don't have a high definition television, just a plain old Sony that we bought in 1998.

[welshTerrier2]

8. DirecTV: frequently ...

thunderstorms or even very heavy rain usually cause outages ... these usually last for a fairly brief time (5 - 10 minutes) ...

big snowstorms are another story though ... when snow intensity gets up to about 1/2 inch per hour, there goes DirecTV ... poof ... it's gone ... and that's just from the snow that's falling ...

if the snow sticks to my dish, i need to go out on my deck and throw snowballs at it ... if you know any major league teams looking for a pitcher, have them give me a call ... let me tell you, it's no easy throw ... my dish is attached near the top of my chimney which is very high ...

the outages are something of a pain but i've learned to live with them ... one thing that sometimes helps is that i get my local channels off an external antenna rather than paying Directv $4.95 a month ... so i least that's an option during outages if i just have to watch TV ...

[Maddy McCall]

12. Your antenna needs to be re-aimed at the satellite.

Sounds like it's out of alignment. I live in the deep south, and I've never had signal loss since I got the new dish and box last year. Before that, I did have frequent outages.

[welshTerrier2]

19. don't think so ...

my signal strength meter is showing 95% ... when we get heavy rain or snow, that drops down to 50% or so until we lose the signal ...

we have had our equipment for a while though ... maybe for 5 or 6 years ... i wonder if the newer equipment is any better ...

[obxhead]

9. direcway net

all the damn time!!! rain, bird, wind, whatever....
signal strength @ 92% or better.

[Not_Giving_Up]

10. Only when the radar turn red in the direction that the dish is pointed

Most of the time, it's all good. I have Dish.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

13. just to have Free Speech Network "deep dish" is worth outages

http://www.freespeech.org/fsitv/fscm2/genx.php?name=home

Featured Video & Audio
From the Freespeech TV Program library
http://www.freespeech.org/fsitv/fscm2/genx.php?name=featured_videos

[CornField]

14. Former directv user -- no signal every time it rained

Matter-of-fact, we knew when rain was on the way because the dish would go out. We did purchase one of those rain-guard things, but it didn't help.

[RebelOne]

15. Every time it rains with my DishNetwork.

Sometimes it just takes some heavy clouds and I lose the signal.

[BlondieK143]

16. Direct TV - maybe once in the whole time we've had it.

Never have a problem when it rains or anything.

[purr]

17. Had both direct and dish..

(went back to dish)

Direct went out every time it so much as sprinkled out. Dish goes out only when its really bad out.

[Orsino]

18. Less often than I did with cable.

With cable, inside metro Atlanta, I'd have outages lasting more than a day, and in the fall of '95 I was out of luck for two weeks after a hurricane. The cable company's number was jammed, of course, through out these times, and I wasted hours on hold that did nothing to help restore service.

With DISH, I get the occasional outages--no more than 30 minutes total--during the worst part of thunderstorms. In the first year of DISH, in fact, I had three receivers die on me, necessitating a few days wait for replacements. The current box has been fine for a couple of years, and still has the last episodes of Buffy recorded.

[tyedyeto]

20. It only happens when

there is a downpour with my Dish.

[ucmike]

21. direct tv. sometimes momentary outages before heavy rain

i've had it for 4 years. my dish is installed on the side of my shed and since it was put there a big bush has grown over it, concealing it completely, still no problem.

as others mentioned, if there is a heavy thunderstorm in the path of the signal it will go out (20 minutes was the worst ever). as the storms move to our south we see interference, when its raining here we have no problem.