Tuners going out on DVR40 S2 DTivos?

[zardano]

I have 2 RCA DVR40 tuners that I bought off ebay in 2007. A few months ago, one of them started having problems with pixelization, but only on one of the tuners, and only on a few select channels (BBCA and a few of the 500s, 501 for sure). Even the pixelization problem seems sporadic on those channels.

Now last week my other one stopped receiving most of the local channels (Fox, NBC, ABC, and CBS; I still get the CW, PBS, and everything else). The channels arn't pixelated, they just arn't showing up at all (black screen). There is no error message at the bottom of the screen or anything, just a black screen and no audio. 2 calls to DTV have resulted in "we don't know, we've exhausted our tech support sheet, pay us to send a technician out." I'm not thrilled at that prospect. This DTivo doesn't have problems with pixelation on any of the other channels, and both tuners are showing the black screen on those 4 channels only.

I have 3 spare DTivos and one "parts" Dtivo that can't be subscribed due to the previous owner not closing out their account with DTV, so I could try to remove the tuner from that one and solder it onto one of my subbed boxes. The card activation guys told me I couldn't switch the card over from the suspected bad Dtivo to one of my 3 spares and I would have to buy a new $20 access card for any box I wanted to add on to my account. Before I do this I wanted to be sure that the problem is in the box and not something else. Anyone have a clue as to what's going on here?

[stevel]

The local channel issue is being seen a lot by people who have not updated to 6.4a - the guide data format is apparently no longer compatible with 6.2. One of the major changes in 6.4 was to accommodate a change in the guide data format. It is not a tuner issue.

[zardano]

Thanks stevel...that's a big help! I'm at 6.2a I think, so I'll look into getting the slices to update to 6.4a. One reason I havn't updated is I use MRV...will I lose it if I update?

EDIT: Uggh, found your post here confirming my fears:

Yes, no MRV in 6.4. I am not surprised that those with old versions have problems like this. 6.4 was put out to handle new formats of guide data. Is there anyone with 6.4A that also lists channels?

Might be time for me to look to other options, since losing MRV is kind of a deal-breaker for me...

[unitron]

One possible cause of strange symptoms is a flaky power supply.

Have you examined your capacitors lately?

[zardano]

Yeah, actually the p/s went bad on the one that's pixelating, and I swapped in a good one from a parts box, and it didn't fix the pixelization. Then I replaced all the capacitors in the one that went bad with high quality Panasonic caps from Digikey as suggested by PlainBill, and it fixed the p/s, but not the garbled video problem. So, I'm pretty sure it's the tuners on that box, especially since it's only a problem on Satellite input #1. I may just have to pay the $20 fee to get a new access card subbed to one of my spare boxes and retire this unit that's been acting up.