This hot. DIRECTV’s SWM16 multiswitch is a miracle of modern technology, but it’s not a miracle of thermal engineering. It runs hot, too hot to touch in some cases, and that’s perfectly normal. It can run 10-15 degrees…
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It’s not something you see every day… at least not any more. Many a DIRECTV veteran has a dozen of these B-Band converters in a box in the garage, but if you’ve been with DIRECTV fewer…
To Balun or Not to Balun That TV antenna? When should it be done? In an article of mine published in Popular Communications, January 2013, “An Omnidirectional DTV Antenna – With Gain,” I included a little…
As your equipment ages, you may notice that it has gotten noisier. This can be due to a lot of different things, and while there are some you can fix, there are other things you…
Come on, you know you love DIRECTV’s Genie Remote. Maybe you were a doubter at first, but it’s easy to use, easy to hold, and gives you just what you need. So you want to have a…
I came home from a two-week business trip that felt a lot longer than 14 days. When I finally walked inside my house, my hands were filled with luggage, two weeks of mail, and my…
There’s been a video floating around the internet about a woman who was “scammed” when a door-to-door representative switched her from DIRECTV to DISH, and she said she wasn’t informed. In the end, she was switched…
WRONG TOOL: Your hand. Finger tight is not tight enough for most coax connections. The only (possible) exception is the connection between the receiver and the final leg of coax. For connecting to splitters and…
Does this receiver look familiar? It’s the DIRECTV D12, the last standard-definition-only receiver ever made by DIRECTV. Believe it or not, it only went out of service for commercial customers last year and actually in most…
Nothing like settling in to an evening of televised entertainment… courtesy of DIRECTV. If you have DIRECTV service at home, there’s no reason not to put a DIRECTV dish on your RV as well. DIRECTV’s rules…
What a nightmare. Back when a decent-sized flat panel could set you back $10k or more, many a proud owner dreaded the day when he would come home and find the words “Now Playing” or some…
The person who invented the telephone. Was it Alexander Graham Bell? Maybe. Bell gets the credit, largely due to clever legal maneuvering and light traffic on the way to the patent office. In the late 19th…
It’s a fact that all batteries, even rechargeable ones, wear out eventually. As wonderful as all our gadgets are, they produce a constant stream of used, useless batteries. Unfortunately, batteries are full of all sorts…
Bigger just has to mean better, right? That’s not the case with the 1.2 meter DIRECTV dish designed for use in Alaska and Hawaii. It’s quite a behemoth, so before you think about using it to improve your…
If you’ve been reading our series, you probably learned a lot about cables. You’ve learned how a well-built cable with a firm connector can keep your signal nice and strong while a poorly built cable can…