Zach Bolinger
DirecWay Troubleshooting Guide
Low signal strength means that you have not properly pointed the dish. More than likely, you just need to spend more time making tiny adjustments looking for that one little spot that gives you the results you need.
When you consistently find a position that gives you a peak level, and that level is not high enough, you probably have another problem.
If you cannot get the dish to go over 30%, you are probably homed in on the wrong satellite. There are many satellites that are within a few degrees of latitude from each other. They use different frequencies, but with the tendancy of frequencies to decay as they travel through the atmosphere, they do spread and you can get enough bleed-through to generate 30% strength when you are pointed at the wrong satellite. If you suspect this to be the case, turn off the power to the unit, face the dish away from your target and let any charge in the LNB dissipate for 15 seconds. Attempt to point the dish again, this time starting about 5 degrees to the right or left of where you were picking up the 30% signal.
If you go through this routine several times and still get a 30% cap on signal strentgh, you might have the polarity reverse. Many units do not have labels for which way is positive and which way is negative when you twist the LNB to set the polarity. Try twisting to the same number in the opposite direction and restart the pointing process.
Bad cables can also stop you from getting a good signal. Just hooking up the dish should give you 10% signal strength since you now have cables and an LNB picking up background noise. If you get less than 10% on the real time reporting bar, you probably have bad cables. See this page for details. If you get zero strength, you might have a burnt out receiver on the modem. Make sure you are using the real time bar chart from the advanced section for this measurement. The system status page sometimes reports a 10% reading as zero since it indicates you are nowhere near pointing the dish in the right direction.