I began troubleshooting the symptoms in my mind this morning (as the cold wind blew and the chilly rain started falling at a nice rate).
LNBFs may fail slowly, but why now?
What is the last thing that I did to my system to cause a change?
(I sprayed the dish with Pam to keep the snow from sticking 4 or 5 weeks ago).
Now that was dumb, and caused the dish to have a nice sheen in the sunlight
and it was textured when it got cold causing the "bounce" of the signal to be fragmented. I noticed the signal loss everyday the temperature dropped. That is why I "scrubbed" the dish. The Pam had been removed after my wife scrubbed it two days ago, then I scrubbed it yesterday just to be sure.
Before that I added an 18" dish to receive Muzak from Echostar 7 @ 119.
That worked out great as I also received the Nasa Channel off of the same satellite.
The weak spot in the whole equation though is the $4.00, 22kHz Switch that I used to switch dishes.....
After removing the switch from the mix, (and not receiving Echostar 7) I have restored the signal level back to the 70's with the signal quality in the high 60's again.
Thanks Rainman for your help, as I may need that bit of info about the hairdryer in the future.
Bill
p.s.
With my ankle busted, I wasn't happy about making even one trip out to the back yard to "work" on the dish, let alone losing TV signal daily.
(screams out loud!)