Dish is still raising eyebrows with new visitors, but otherwise doing just fine.
(Must say that the dosh spent on the Channel Masters was some of the best I ever spent).
But something else has actually changed; the signal path.
I moved the FoxSat from the server-closet to the living room.
This eliminated the IR extender and HDMI extenders.
Especially the RF IR extender was giving us a lot of grief.
This also means that the main signal no longer comes straight from LNB over quad-shielded cables into the Humax.
Instead the two feeds comes into a wiring cabinet, one gets combined with cable TV signal, then both are sent through another 15 metres of (only) double shielded cable to a wall-socket. At wall socket one is split again from cable TV signal, and both are sent through another couple of metres of double-shielded cable (with at least two L-shaped F connectors on each), and then into the box.
And everything still work fine...
Only symptom of signal path prolongment is that the Humax sometimes complains about "no or bad signal" for 1 second when zapping before picture comes on. I ascribe this to the lag in the auto-gain circuit of the tuners on the Humax. The actual signal is now so weak, especially on the combined/split signal, that the AGC needs to kick in before the box will tune properly. (?)
But it still works just great, and I can see from the status page that the signal quality is 100% on most if not all channels.
In other words, the C/N ratio is still very good, it's just the absolute signal strength which is a bit low. I dare conclude that signal quality still matters over signal quantity.