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Kman08
@184.21.45.x

2 edits

Kman08 to dbirdman

Anon

to dbirdman

Re: [HN7000S] Any HN7000S users losing signal @ same time every

After re-reading "suceress" post, I can see that this must be some kind of a shroud. I am not familiar with this shield. I thought we were talking about the transparent plastic shielding that is sealed to the front of the feed horn to keep out rain and moisture.
suceress
join:2008-04-04

1 edit

suceress

Member

It was a sort of beige (or possibly gray-- I can't remember anymore) hard plastic cover that snapped over the feed horn. I was told it was to protect it from snow. There is no cover over the feed horn now. Wasps get in to everything here and humidity is usually 100%. I inspected the cables on both ends and they show no signs of damage, rust, or even age.

Kman, is the satellite for Exede in the southern sky? I'm torn between taking advantage of the discount of $100 off the setup fee before Oct. 31 or waiting awhile and for the monthly lease fee to go away. Perhaps it will eventually go away. I asked about buying the equipment outright and they said it wasn't possible at this time (but they want that lease fee). I wonder if I could get them to pull off my Hughesnet dish and put the Exede dish on the existing pole.

Which plan did you go with. I'm thinking of trying the lowest plan and seeing if I really need more than 10Gb during regular hours. Some days I barely use the internet at all. From what I understand, the capped speeds of going over are actually still faster than what I frequently get from Hughesnet.

I tried to do the push-pull test but I didn't have any other volunteers to watch the signal strength and my laptop didn't get signal from the router all the way out by the dish so I had to abort. I may try later when someone is around to help and it isn't so cold.

Millenicom works nicely sometimes, but the amp and antenna never worked for it. I've listened to heavy thunder outside while gleefully loading webpages and noting that Hughesnet was down. Unfortunately it doesn't lend itself well to multiple computers and doesn't always seem to work. Sometimes it is just unbearably slow. But it is good for those times when Hughesnet is completely out. One day my Latency in WoW was under 300 and I was overjoyed. Too bad it only lasted about 15 minutes.

Thank you for all of the replies!
Kman08
join:2012-10-27
Redwood, NY

Kman08

Member

Thanks for your description on the cover. I was not familiar with that. It clears it up for me though. Thank you.

I am not sure where you are located. For me, yes, southern sky. In fact very close to the same position that my Hughes HN7000 set up was. The dish still points to the general direction that Syracuse is located. The azimuth for my dish to point to get on to the beam from VIASAT-1 was at (true) 229.5 degrees, (magnetic 242.7 degrees. I use the site www.dishpointer.com to locate my azimuth from my address. There are others. But I like their set up. Of course the satellite itself is located a 115.1 W. You can put in your address and obtain the information you need.

I wish there was something that would be done with the lease fee too. I find that distasteful. And I wish the LNFZ period would extend one hour in both directions as well. Other than that, I have enjoyed the service so far. It has been, again I am compelled to say this, (so far), worked fairly well for us/better than Hughes was.

I think Hughes, will at some point have to figure out how to handle their customers in the residential market. It likely just boils down to making a determination whether those customers are worth retaining or not and if so getting very serious about it. Because they definitely have some work to do, especially in technical support and customer service, this is my own personal perspective. I hated the way they handled issues, concerns, or problems that came up over the years with them. And I really hated my feeling that they botched up the rollover bank plan. And then I did have an install for the GEN 4, but that got so confused, messed up, and I just felt like they really did not have their act together so I dropped them. I called Exede on a Friday, and I was in service by Monday morning. And so far, so good. I went with the 15Gb plan with 12Mbps down/3Mbps up. Me too, sometimes I use the net, not at all, and other days heavy.

I am not sure I catch what your saying about the capped speeds? I have not gone over our cap yet. When I did make the decision to hit the 15 plan, it was based on our consumption rates over the years with Hughes. And the 15 plan worked out to be a bit higher than our old Pro Plus did. And although we are not paying anymore for this service than we did for Hughes, because we did pay for Hughes equipment up front too. But if Exede continues the path now, and hits for a lease at the end of our contract, then we might at that point be faced with termination of service, or something else. If Hughes fails to recognize that they need to treat customers better, then maybe I would jump there. But I hope I can work it out with Exede. We shall see. From what I can read over my plan, my speeds return to normal during the late night free zone periods, but I have been able to experience that yet. Maybe I could push things a bit hard right now and push it into the FAP to find out what really happens, but some on the Wild Blue/Exede forum are saying it works. When we were FAP'd with Hughes, I don't think there was any return of speeds during the late night free time. I cannot remember, but we had to use a token. Those tokens, I will say, was a great morale boost when I was with Hughes. I would have dropped them back last summer, when I could have been up on Exede then, but that token was a huge step in the right direction. As long as I am being so long winded here. I also wish Exede would allow for a rollover of unused data to the next month. Even if that had a limitation to that, it would be really nice.

That sucks that your wifi did not reach out to your dish. I use a range extender here because of the size of our property and I like streaming music or whatever, while I work outside or cut the grass. Where are you? I am not familiar with Millenicom.

Oh yeah, I just saw what you said about your pole. I had the large Hughes dish, .98 and the installer for Exede did not have a problem at all adapting the smaller dish to our pole. I could get a few pics of it maybe today to show you how they did that.
One More Too
join:2010-09-09
Galena, IL

One More Too to suceress

Member

to suceress
said by suceress:

I tried to do the push-pull test but I didn't have any other volunteers to watch the signal strength and my laptop didn't get signal from the router all the way out by the dish so I had to abort. I may try later when someone is around to help and it isn't so cold.

If you download and use the utility that I pointed you toward in an earlier post, you don't need someone to help you read the changes in the signal levels. It will give you an audible indication of the signal level.
suceress
join:2008-04-04

1 edit

suceress to Kman08

Member

to Kman08
Lets see, my true Azimuth is 218.8 and magnetic is 217.4. I called Exede to bombard them with questions. I'm not happy about the monthly sales tax, but there isn't anything they can do about that I guess. It's about $5 I think. I hope they go by the sales tax for being outside the city because within the city is 10% sales tax. But I'm out in the sticks where I don't get mail delivery, city water, sewage, trash pickup, or paved roads. Technically I could get trash pickup if I were to drive my trash out about a mile and drop it off and hope the trash guys bothered to come on the trash day, but my neighbors stole my trashcans so many times (and when I put my name on the cans they destroyed the cans instead) I decided it is best to just drive my stuff to the city dump about 20 miles away.

The Exede saleswoman told me they might be able to install on the existing pole with no additional fee and when I asked how soon it was available it was actually available before the scheduled Hughesnet repair (which I ordered last week). For now I've canceled the repair call because things were working again.

I couldn't get my laptop to a place where it could still get signal and that I could hear it while trying to do the push/pull test.

I wonder if the cables would need to be changed out. Right now my cables route from behind the house all the way along the exterior west wall and then partially along the exterior of the north wall and then through the wall into the house to the living room. It's a pretty long run, but they didn't have any other suggestions on how to route the wires to that room when Direcway did the initial installation. I believe I actually have some spare coaxial cable lying around in the house from one of the repair calls.

I'm thinking the 10Gb a month plan would work for me because most days I barely touch my daily limit. I don't load videos every day and when I do its usually small clips less than 5 minutes. The most I ever download is when I do software updates, Sims 3 patches, and World of Warcraft patches.

Millenicom is just a redistributor for Sprint/Verizon. In my case it is Sprint 3G (4G is not available) and they provided me with better prices than just getting a contract directly with Sprint.

If it warms up, I could probably try to get a picture of my dish, and see if the weather cover for the feedhorn is still lying around somewhere and take a picture. Pictures take a long time to upload though.

Edit to add: I used that pointing page you talked about and was able to zoom in and drop the x right on top of my existing satellite. I'm surprised that the dish is actually visible. It's just a white splotch.

grohgreg
Dunno. Ask The Chief
join:2001-07-05
Dawson Springs, KY

grohgreg

Member

If your existing cable doesn't have a solid copper center conductor and/or has a frequency response of less than 2.2GHz, you should have it replaced. Be advised, that ViaSat/Exede requires your cable ground block location to be with 20' of the residential common ground (typically at the electrical service entrance). There is an acceptable grounding alternative, but it's expensive.

And as a Hughes customer, I don't waste much time on Exede in general. So I don't know if they've got something similar. But Hughes has a smartphone app that you can use for dish pointing. Oh, I've got a lot of Hughes spare parts that are looking for a new home. If you can get that photo, I can tell you if I've got anything that will work.

//greg//
suceress
join:2008-04-04

suceress

Member

They have a copper ground wire leaving the pole and have it in the ground if that is what you are talking about. Is that what you mean? I really need to get myself updated on all the new technology stuff. It might have been a shorter run had they routed the cable through the house and the attic and then to that room, but then again, the attic is a scary place that nobody has ventured into in years and there could be possoms and raccoons up there. We don't currently have a ladder that will reach to let us get up there.

Thanks for the heads up on that though.

grohgreg
Dunno. Ask The Chief
join:2001-07-05
Dawson Springs, KY

grohgreg

Member

Nope. The coaxial cable must have a solid copper center conductor, that's the sharp bit that's partially sticking out of a connector that's unscrewed. A lot of copper coated steel was used in the past, and it's not acceptable anymore. Freq response is often harder to determine though. If it's not printed on the cable itself (bunch of letters and numbers every 3 feet or so), hopefully at least the manufacturer and model is legible. With that info I can sometimes look up the freq response.

But if your ground wire doesn't go any farther than the pole, that's a problem too. In fact, it's a violation of electrical code. The new system must be extended to the common ground point. Sounds like you might benefit from a whole new installation.

//greg//
suceress
join:2008-04-04

suceress

Member

Ok. Thank you for that info. Hopefully, the installer will be aware of that when he comes out (I'm assuming it will be a "he"-- I've never seen a female installer out here). I wonder if it would be extra if they have to run different cables considering they would have to do so anyway if they were putting the dish on the roof or side.

This time we scheduled it for morning so I won't have to worry about the installer showing up at 5pm and then not being able to do the install because it gets dark early. We had a bad experience with the Direcway installer not even showing up on the date he was supposed to (about a week late) and then showed up after 5pm. He then sat in his truck and chatted with his cousin for 45 minutes before even starting the install but it got dark before he could finish so he had to come back another day. He didn't even install the pole. He had his cousin (who was NOT an installer) go buy a pole on another day-- all the hardware stores here close at 5 or earlier on weekdays, noon on Saturdays, and are closed on Sundays. The cousin bought a pole that was too short and flimsy and then used our cement to set it, but still charged $100 for the pole install. That was a problem for a few years. I think the installer didn't come back for another week and didn't even get it up and running so it took 3 visits for it to work. That should have been a red flag right then, but we had no other options. Dialup was no longer working because the phone lines to my house were too degraded and the phone company at the time refused to do anything about it (they were since bought out by AT&T and had to replace the lines to our house and the entire phone box down the street).

Sorry for all the babbling.