Liz, Spent this past weekend with help from my son, an electrician, checking out the complete Hughesnet installation, from the dish to the modem. What we found is best described as shoddy workmanship. At the dish, was section of RG59 (NOT RG6) coax cable with a ground wire, commonly called a Siamese cable. The coax was connected to the LNB/transceiver and the ground wire was connected to the dish. The other end of the ground wire ran to a ground block on the mast of my Directv dish (you read that correctly). That ground block was loosely taped to the mast, not making a good connection. The output of the ground block was connected to a dual shield RG6 cable that was installled when my house was built in 2004. The original Hughesnet installer and every technician that has been here since was made aware of this, yet did not want to take time to replace the cable with quad shielded RG6. It took us about 15 minutes to pull new quad shielded RG6 cable into the existing conduit. According to information from Hughesnet, quad shielded RG6 cable from the dish to the grounding block is sufficient grouding for the dish. At the entry point into the building, the original installer made a big deal about having to install a ground block and a ground wire. He did in fact install that, but did not attach the ground wire to a known electrical ground. This was proven by a simple ohm meter test. Again, according to information from Hughesnet and the National Electrical Code, a ground point at the dish and and at the building entry point is acceptable, but they must be bonded together. Clearly, they were not. So after all this was corrected, I was still experiencing call drops. On Monday, 8/12/2019, I spent several hours on the phone with Hughesnet tech support, requiring numerous call backs due to the dropped calls. The first agent I talked to, called back after the first two drops, but did not call back after that, and left me hanging with additional questions. That does not make for good customer satisfaction. The second agent, I wish I had his name, continued to call back after every disconnect. He performed a number of tests, and had engineering look at the problem. They found that ping time would intermittently rise to a level that could cause the call drops. Refer to my previous post where the SQF was dropping from above 100 to 30. It is obvious that these are related to the problem. When these tests were performed, my LAN was disconnected from the Hughesnet modem, so that the only thing connected was the ATA. Now tech support and engineering want to replace the ATA once again, but wont send it to me directly, they insist that a technician come out to replace it. This does not give me a good feeling, since I had to show the last technician what an ATA was, and what it is supposed to do. Also, in my previous post I mentioned that one of the technicians had replaced my 2 watt transmitter with a 1 watt transmitter. He apparently did not there was a difference. I was told by tech support that the 1 watt transmitters are being phased out in favor of the 2 watt transmitters and that the technician would bring a 2 watt transmitter with him. I am waiting on a call from the technician to shedule the service call and I will verify that he has the 2 watt transmitter. Otherwise, it will be a wasted service call and wasted time. Both the transmitter and the ATA are very simple for anyone to install, no "technician" required.
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