[wejones]

Re the rain outages, I've found it interesting that at least up north, the outages typically don't occur when the rain is heaviest, ie directly overhead, but I usually experience outages when the rainstorms are passing just south of us. Often the outages occur when it isn't even raining at my house, and often when it's raining cats and dogs we don't have an outage.
I've concluded that it's because my line of sight to the sats is typically lower than 45 degrees, and what causes the outage is not the actual "rain" but the big storm clouds, which might be 15-20,000' high, so the best angle to the storm clouds is when the storms are passing south of us. Not an important fact, but I thought it was interesting.

Re to the signal meter, I've been fed up with mine at times, but I've found it very useful. My guess that what happened above, is that the meter was responding to a sat different to what you were trying to hit, so you won't get quality unless you have the freq/SR set right for the sat you're aimed at. Particularly if your meter led you to a DBS sat. I've found the meters quite handy, but I think it helps to be pretty close on your aim before you start using the meter. Like at least be set at the right azimuth so you're just changing one parameter that would only get you to one satellite. If you are just searching at random, no telling what sat you'll peak on. When you were searching using the receiver, you were searching for a specific freq/SR value, so that will only respond if you are at the right sat. Using the receiver, however, requires a LOT more patience, however, as your changes have to be very slow with pauses between.

Re to the question about the meter causing signal loss, in my experience this should be negligeable. You get much more signal loss from the RG59, but even that shouldn't keep you from getting a lock on strong signals.