Well, I was still trying to get the darn
Mercury to work with
AC3, still no success, however I've been using it to feed my
Twinhan via the passthru.
Today, I was watching one of the
PBS channels on the
Twinhan, and was just starting to record something, when the signal started going away, and eventually went completely away. I checked the
Mercury, and it was gone there too. I thought maybe
solar outage, but checked, and the sun wasn't even close. I tried to peak the satellite, but still nothing. Then, while I was just sitting there trying to think of something else, the signal came back while I was doing NOTHING. Went from zero, up to about 60% quality (which was normal for the transponder I was on). Then, a few minutes later, it started jumping between 60 and 20%, sometimes fast, sometimes slow.
I thought perhaps my
DiseqC switch was going bad, so I bypassed that, and ran the coax directly to the
Mercury. Still jumping between 20 and 60%. Tried several other things, then, decided to switch back to my old Ultra as a test. ..... ROCK SOLID 60%. Very strange. Strange too, because the problem seems to be only on Ku, not
C-band, although I'm not positive about that yet. There shouldn't be any difference between C and Ku, since both are coming in as the 950-1450 IF. Also strange, because it wasn't passing the signal to the
Twinhan.
Anyway, very annoying. Unfortunately, I don't have too much time to play with it since a snowstorm is coming, and I'm going to have to park the dish soon. Maybe I'll get more chance to experiment Saturday.