Current Events > Apparently we've been getting pirate satellite TV free for years at my work

(+) Yeah! (+)

Well, it's not really pirated - we had a subscription once, with a legitimate box. Somewhere along the line, we stopped paying, but the provider never cut off our service.

Now the satellite receiver box is old and broken, and we're trying to figure out how to replace it. Maybe the dealership management company will have to start paying its bills?

Depends. Which service is it? Dish?

You can probably have it repaired by someone with a bit of electronics knowledge. Sometimes it's just a blown electrolytic capacitor on the box or something, you have to open it and look at them, if one or several are bloated, that's probably the culprit.
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HagenEx posted...

Depends. Which service is it? Dish?

You can probably have it repaired by someone with a bit of electronics knowledge. Sometimes it's just a blown electrolytic capacitor on the box or something, you have to open it and look at them, if one or several are bloated, that's probably the culprit.

I thought about that. The box itself appears to power on, but we're not getting a signal to the TV. It's a very old box - model DISH311. The RF/coax output to the TV is missing, so we're using RCA cables to hook it up.

The front channel selector buttons are also broken. I've managed to get them to work in the past by inserting a small pointy object to physically depress the button contacts, but it's a royal pain in the butt.

I haven't opened the box yet since I'm still at work. I have a soldering iron at home, and have repaired cold or broken solder joints in the past but never blown caps.

Update: the contractor through which we get our Dish service has renewed our contract and is willing to replace the box under warranty as long as we pay our backed-up invoices. They sent me the number and email to their internal collections department lmao

Lmao.
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HagenEx posted...

Lmao.

Oh, it gets better. My customer relations manager says we haven't payed for the service in about ten years. He also forwarded me an email from the management company with a PDF of the new contract, which lists our billing rate as $110/mo with a one-time $50 activation fee. According to my calculations, if they charge us ten years of backpayments, we owe them about $13,250.

Really, the only solution is to fix the box until management pays their bills.