You may just need to reset the satellite programming. To do this you need a laptop with hyperTerminal installed (or equivalent) and a serial cable. Here's the procedure:
Installing Satellites for KVH R4/R5
Occasionally we hear that people cannot get their KVH R4/R5 domes to lock onto a satellite – the Owner’s Manual that came with my dome says that the North American satellites are already programmed into the system, but I could not get my system to lock on to a satellite until I performed the following operation using my laptop computer. The process is quite simple, and the required serial cable should have been supplied with your system. If not you can get a serial cable at any computer store, or office supply store. If your laptop computer does not have a serial port you will have to also get a USB-to-serial adapter, also available at the computer stores.
Equipment Needed:
· PC with HyperTerminal or equivalent – Windows XP has HyperTerminal installed – Vista does not, but it does have an equivalent program called “telnet”. Telnet is not installed into Vista by default, but it can be installed easily – use the “Help” feature of Vista for more information.
· Serial cable
1. Connect PC to dish using serial cable connected from the serial port of the PC to the serial port on the dish panel. This panel is where the power switch for the dome is located – the port is in the middle of the front panel, right next to the power switch.
2. Open HyperTerminal and make sure the following settings are set (I haven’t used telnet but there should be similar settings available for it):
a. Bits per second: 9600
b. Data bits: 8
c. Parity: none
d. Stop bits: 1
e. Flow Control: none
3. Power up the dish and wait about a minute for the initialization process to complete. There should be some data scrolling on the PC monitor, reporting any errors found during the power-up process. If not, check your connections.
4. Once the data connection has been made you can assign specific satellites using the following commands:
a. HALT <ENTER> - this places the dish in idle mode
b. SATINSTALL, <sat_a_name>, <sat_b_name> <ENTER> - the names of the various satellites are in the table, below.
c. ZAP <ENTER> - sends the commands to the dish and restarts the system.
SATELLITE INSTALL NAME
DSS 72W DSS_72
DSS 101W DSS_101
DSS119W DSS_119
EchoStar 61W Echo_61
EchoStar 110W Echo_110
EchoStar 119W Echo_119
EchoStar 148W Echo_148
ExpressVu 82 Expressvu
ExpressVu 91 ExpressTV
5. Example: to assign DirecTV 72 and DirecTV 101 use the following commands:
a. HALT <ENTER>
b. SATINSTALL,DSS_72,DSS_101 <ENTER>
c. ZAP <ENTER>
Once this is completed the dish should be able to locate, and lock onto, the specified satellites. It worked for me when my RV dealer could not get my dome to work on my b rand new motorhome.
The dealer told me to bring it back so they could trouble shoot it. After three solid days the dealer gave up and replaced it with a new one from KVH, no problems since. I am using the Bell bird. Sorry forgot to mention mine would work for a hour or so then not at all, sometimes it would not even move. I personaly think it was a board problem.
Linear Mode
