My DirecTv Saga: You Twisted My Arm, Don't Say I Didn't Warn Ya.
By Dave B
4 days ago, on Monday afternoon, I'm sitting on my couch watching my big screen TV. The weather outside is hot and sunny. The TV screen freezes and an error message pops up. For only a second or two, the picture comes back, but it then disappears and the screen displays an error message. Is it the usual 771 error message that appears when a storm causes a short-term outage? No, it is not. It's a 775 error, which I had never seen before. The accompanying language states that the satellite box is having trouble communicating with the satellite dish.
After checking the cables and going
through the reset process multiple times, the result is always the same: 775.
I go outside to see if anything is blocking the dish. There's a cob web or two, but surely not anything which could interfere with the signal. Nevertheless, I go back inside and get a broom to sweep away the webs. Multiple failed attempts to successfully restart later, I stop trying. I watch already-recorded material from the satellite DVR box, without difficulty.
Eventually, I go to sleep without the TV on, very unusual for me.
It's now Tuesday morning, and I put my thinking cap back on.
It so happens that a few days prior, Steve, who is installing underskirting on my doublewide, had done the underskirting on the part of the front of the house where the cable enters. The cable is underground but not very far underground, and Steve is doing a really excellent (if slow) job with the underskirting. We're using metal roofing as the material, and Steve digs a shallow trench so that the bottom edge is slightly underground.
I send Steve a text asking if he thinks it's possible that the underskirting could have damaged the cable. "I don't think so", he responds.
"Well", I text back, "my DirecTv has been out since yesterday. How hard would it be to take off that piece of underskirting and take a look at the wire?"
"I'll be over in a few hours", Steve responds.
A few hours later, with about an hour of daylight remaining, Steve comes over, unscrews the screws holding the applicable sheet of metal, pulls off the metal sheet, and takes a look at the wire where it passes underneath the house.
"Looks like you were right", says Steve. "The wire seems like it got messed up".
I couldn't tell, looking over Steve's shoulder, what the degree of wire damage was, or whether there was bare wire showing. But I could see that the outer covering was abraded, and I judged that Steve seemed convinced that the wire was definitely damaged enough to make it impossible for the signal to travel from the dish to the box in the house.
Steve went ahead and severed the wire, then asked me if I had any cable connectors. He should have done these things in reverse order. He seemed to think he could attach the wires temporarily with wire nuts, but I knew that could not be done. In fact, he only attached the central wires to each other. You can't make a connection without the outer foil conductors being attached to each other as well. That makes one thing I knew, handyman-wise, that Steve didn't. Still, Steve knows about 10 times as much regarding construction as I do.
I told Steve that we were NOT going to be able to connect the wires until we had the appropriate tools and connectors, and that there was no point in trying to do anything else today. He came in the house and we had
another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat a couple of Budweisers, played some guitar and then argued about whether or not the Floyd Rose bridge on my guitar can use strings with ball ends. I won my second dispute of the day on that one when I pulled out my coil-making magnifying headset so that he could see for himself that the string ends still had the balls attached.
I looked up the tools that we needed, and the next day, Steve went and bought them. In the evening, we added connectors, screwed the connectors together, cranked up the ole satellite box and... nope, still no dice. We tried a bunch more times but the results stayed the same.
We give up on the project for the time being. Steve comes in, we have some Bud (Steve brings his own), then I play piano while Steve plays drums. A good time was had by all. I tell Steve that I was sure the satellite TV failure was his fault, but that now I really am beginning to doubt that there was any connection. I pay him for the tools he bought... he doesn't want to take the money but I insist... it wasn't a huge amount but shoot, he had to make the trip to town to get the stuff and he's been working for nothing regarding this TV problem of mine.
So now I'm starting to really wonder if the problem had anything to do with the wire that runs from the dish to the box. I sign up for Hulu and watch some Amazon Prime movies, for which I have already given
reviews. Of course, I could repeat those reviews here, but that might make this a long post, and I definitely am going to keep it short.
But that's not what I came here to talk about.
I soon realize that my Internet connection speed just can't handle any kind of heavy-duty streaming. Nevertheless, I'm able to get my news fixes online, and watch Amazon Prime. For some reason, Amazon Prime streams better than anything else... maybe they use superior technology... but still, that's not Live Streaming, it's stuff they already have in brown paper packages tied up with string... that's why they're a few of my favorite things.
I ditch Hulu and try Fubo Tv. For my money, Fubo is a better programming fit. I call DirecTv and suspend my service for 6 months, which they allow, in order for me to have time to think it over.
DirecTv has been pretty good to me, although it's pricey and they nickel and dime you to death. Now that my account is suspended, I try to sign up for DirecTv Now, a streaming service offered by DirecTv. By the way, AT&T now owns DirecTv, so it's an AT&T login rather than a DirecTv login.
What day are we up to? Not sure, it's kind of a blur. I'm unable to sign up for DirecTv Now, because I've got an existing DirecTv account that I've put in suspended status.
Today, I communicate with DirecTv via chat, and I tell them to terminate my account instead of suspending it. This takes like forever, but has the fortunate side effect that I can now sign up for DirecTv Now, which I do.
Meanwhile, I await the CenturyLink technician on Monday, hoping that they're actually able to install 25 Mbps service in place of the 10 Mbps service that they give me now. If so, it will be the same $45 per month that I'm paying now. I already went and bought a modem on Ebay that is compatible with both my existing service and with the faster service.
Faster internet ought to help a lot, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much. Even if things don't get any better than they are right now, I've got enough Internet and small-screen options to meet my needs without me feeling forlorn about giving up the privilege of paying oodles of dollars monthly for DirecTv UHD Satellite.
A favorite theory of mine is that the trees on the west side of my house, over which there was only a small amount of line-of-sight clearance 25 years ago, have finally blocked the signal. The only problem with this theory is that it would seem to make more sense for the service to become intermittent under those conditions, rather than being perfectly fine one minute and gone forever the next minute.
So, the actual reason may well be hardware-related.
Or maybe a turkey buzzard built a pretty solid nest right in the line of sight in the top of one of those western trees. We shall never know, and I'm OK with that. How about you?
I'm a stickler for proof-reading my own writing. But surely you don't expect me to proofread this. It's too much.
