NICE AND EASY: DIRECTV D12 with a SWM-30 Multiswitch?

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 cases it will still work, as long as it was working before.


But, it didn’t work reliably with the latest multiswitch, the DIRECTV SWM-30. It probably won’t work with a Reverse Band DIRECTV dish either. In our test bench testing, they just didn’t power up. Putting another receiver like an H25 in line, things worked great but with the D12 — no dice.

This also means that you can’t have a D12 in a 4K system since that system requires a digital SWM.

I’m waiting for some news from the folks in the secret corners of DIRECTV HQ, but for now if you still have a D12 and you want to improve your DIRECTV system I would either upgrade it to an H25 receiver or use an older SWM-16 multiswitch instead.

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.