We live in middle Tennessee.
EVERY time it rains heavily, with thunder and lightening and lots of water,
we lose our signal for a moment or so. Sometimes it lasts for for a few
minutes.
I kinda think "so what" It's just TV.
We've gotten so that we use it as a kind of forcasting device. When a big
one is about to hit the screen pixelates and we know we're about to get hit
with a deluge of water.
For emergency weather watching we have one little TV with an antenna on it
to watch a local station.
Don't know what we'll do when it goes all digital, the older TVs in our
house won't pick it up.

We DO have DSL for our internet connection. It took two years of my
badgering BellSouth to get it in our area though.

Personally, I'll put up with a few outages (including our electricity about
twice a month) rather than put up with the cable company.

Kate



"B a r r y" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 20 Jan 2008 10:59:38 GMT, "George" wrote:


Except when it rains,

In 11 years of DirecTV, I've lost the signal far less than when I had
cable. I can remember two weather related DTV issues:

#1 - A chunk of ice resembling a water glass had formed over the LNB.

#2 - During an extremely heavy t-storm, complete with hail, we lost
the signal for ~ 5 minutes. ONE rain-related failure in 11 years!

I'm at a higher US lattitude, where my dish has a rather low aim, so I
would have thought I would have had more problems.

My CATV failed a few times a year, when people hit telephone poles,
the power failed feeding line amps along the way, and when they just
plain screwed up at the head end. Cable also provided me with analog
channels of varying picture quality and audio volume.

You're right about the broadband, though! If no DSL is available,
you need the wire anyway.