Tech Forum

I recently replaced our satellite receiver (Unity 552) and now I have a "STATUS" light that flashes amber 6 times and it should be a steady green. According to the manual this means "RF too high". I'm afraid I have no idea what to do about this and would appreciate any help anyone can offer. I will add that the manual also states that this condition can cause the receiver to fail over time, which is probably why the old one needed to be replaced.

I have called the help line in Salt Lake and they referred me to our PF guy, unfortunately he is at least 8 hrs. away by car and has been unable to help.

Boy, that's a problem most of us have never seen. You might want to re-check the count, as I think the ones either side of that are more likely.

I think if you press the "Enter" button, the on-screen menu will come up and you can get more details of what's going on.

"RF too high" means the received signal is too strong. If that really is the issue, you could probably add an attenuator to drop the level. But that strikes me as unlikely.

I think it's more likely something like "RF too low" which means the signal is too weak. There's a number of possible causes. Junk on the dish or the aim is drifting is a couple of common ones.

btelkamp wrote:I have called the help line in Salt Lake and they referred me to our PF guy, unfortunately he is at least 8 hrs. away by car and has been unable to help.

The FM Group is responsible for the satellite. If they are not able to come and fix it, they usually contract out to a local satellite person, or if you are technically minded, they may work with you over the phone to solve the problem.

I'm just replying to conclude this post and maybe help out someone else if they have similar problems. I finally got the right guy on the phone at the help line and he likened my problem to trying to take a drink from a fire hose. He suggested two solutions to the issue. The first was to buy some gadget and install it inline between the dish and the receiver. He didn't go into much detail about this but I did try and google it and I think the device is called an attenuator, however these are not readily available to me and there would be the question of which one to get. They come in different values. His second suggestion was to install an extra 50' of coax cable between the dish and the receiver. I thought I would give this a go, so I went back to the church and found a couple hunks of cable and some connectors, not sure how much cable there was. I installed it and voila, it worked. The receiver is happy and giving me a green light.

Thanks again to those that replied.