We see intermittent tuners all the time.

If you replay a bad segment, and the problems are exactly the same during the second play as they were in the first, you pretty clearly have a bad tuner.

I have a DirecTV HDDVR, a standard receiver and two TIVO units. One of the units was sending spikes causing problems with all my other receivers. They would pixelate and the audio would cut out for anywhere between 1 and 15 seconds.

Nothing more frustrating than to be watching a show and not know what they are saying.

DirecTV came out many times to resolve the issue. They even removed the HDDVR from the multi-switch and re-installed my old dish. The HD no longer had issues but I still had problems with the bedroom TIVO. As it turned out, my Hughes R10 TIVO developed a major problem. Its tuner 2 was sending out voltage spikes to the point that it blew the multi-switch. I replaced the switch only to see the pixelation return. Since we've been with DirecTV for many years, they sent out a replacement (DirecTV DVR) and all I paid for was for shipping and handling. I'm currently copying the movies out of the defective R-10 and will then pull out the harddrive and use it as an external drive for one of my computers.

Nice of DirecTV to deal with it - pretty interesting problem.

Nice of DirecTV?

They sent me a bill for $75.00 for the original service call. I contacted billing...they couldn't help me. They transferred me to tech support...they couldn't help me so they forwarded my problem to what I call "customer relations." The person that I finally spoke to gave me credit for the service charge considering that we've been with them since 2000 as well as the fact that we upgraded our living room unit to HD this past September. I also had to explain that the original tech support didn't tell me that there was going to be a charge for solving their problem.

The CR person did tell me that in order to get the "free" DVR that I would need to stay with DirecTV for two years. I asked him to check his computer to see how long we had already been with them. He laughed when I told him that two more years wouldn't be a problem.

The CR person also told me that DirecTV sends two different voltages to the LNB. 13 and 18. The even channels send the 13 volts and the odd channels sent the 18 volts. It is possible that my R10 was/is having problems with the voltage regulator for Sat 2 causing it to spike and disrupting the other units within the satellite network. Once the HDDVR was removed from the network, it functioned properly and once the defective R10 was removed, the problem went away altogether.

OK - so it's the least they could do . . .

For the R10 to cause problems with other units, it would have to send voltage back up, and through a multiswitch somehow. We haven't seen that before, but I guess it's possible.