This is a question that comes from a little different place from where you’d think. If you have DIRECTV service at home, you probably don’t think about that old round dish anymore. You probably haven’t seen one in years. You know, I’m talking about this one:
Remember this bad boy? It was the only option for a while, back in the days when DIRECTV was designed for self-installation. Compared to today’s dishes, it was very easy to install indeed, because it looked at only one satellite location, period. Today’s dishes look to as many as five, spread across tens of thousands of miles of sky. They also have to pull in signals from multiple satellites at some location. That’s why today’s dishes practically beg for professional installers. Those installers bring fancy meters that get things perfect, in a way that would be difficult for most home users.
But I’m talking not about talking about that round dish, I’m talking about this one.
If you have an RV or a boat, you may use some variation of this sort of dish. This is a self-aiming dish. Some work while you’re moving, some don’t. One thing you should know is that many of them essentially are “round dishes.” They only look at one satellite location at a time. And that’s where the problem starts.
Genie satellite setup
Ten years ago, if you had a new DIRECTV box to set up, you had to know your “dish type.” There were, if I recall, about 27 of them, and it seemed like some of them were interchangeable. There was a dish type for every kind of dish ever made by DIRECTV and that included ones that weren’t sold anymore.
About four years ago, DIRECTV revamped its satellite setup routines. The good news: The dish type was detected automatically. The bad news: all but about 4 dish types were removed. Essentially, having a Genie meant having a Slimline dish of some sort. There simply wasn’t a way to select the round dish, or any of the older dishes.
For well over 90% of the DIRECTV population, that was great news. For marine and mobile users, it was a challenge. Most of the time, people compensated by using H24, H25, or HR24 receivers that still used the older setup routines.
Another option, sort of
It turns out there’s … almost … a workaround. You can connect your round dish to a SWM-30 multiswitch. Then, you tell the receiver it’s connected to a Slimline-3 multiswitch. The receiver will fail its automated verification. Then, you call the experts at Signal Connect for help. They will help you bypass the error message on your screen.
After that, you can set up a favorites list so you don’t accidentally tune to a channel you can’t get because you can’t see the satellite that they’re on. Occasionally you will still get an error, but then your friends at Signal Connect are there to help you. It’s good having a friend in the business.
In fact, Signal Connect is here for you no matter what your needs. All you need to do is call us! We’re here for you at 888-233-7563 during East Coast business hours. If it’s after hours, just fill out the form below. We’ll get back to you, usually within one business day.
