Here’s what it looks like:
Mine stabilized after I manually refreshed the guide. I also enabled “Enable more frequent program guide refreshes” in the DVR settings.
Thought it might be worth an update. I haven’t seen the issue reoccur now for 3 days. I did double-check all of my connections and noticed that one connection was slightly loose.
I would have thought that that shouldn’t have an impact on the guide though, surely once you map your channels (a one of process) then the guide updates are all done via the internet and no longer rely on any information received over the air?
Will continue to monitor.
Checking in with an update - it’s been about 9 days now without incident. So possibly the slightly loose coaxial connection was the problem. Thanks very much for your help and suggestions.
Damon! Great news! Sorry I haven’t responded recently. Great diving/kayaking conditions and special events with the wife took me offline.
Cable plant problems can cause seemingly random problems over seemingly random time intervals. I’ve been a Senior Networking Consultant for Lucent and British Telecom, to name a few, so I knew to try to eliminate cable issues first.
As to the guide going away once channels are mapped, I believe the logic is and should be, “don’t show airings in the guide for channel(s) that are not available”. A channel may not be available for more than 1 reason. Some examples: 1.) channel not mapped, 2.) channel temporarily not available (weather for OTA, or sporadic cable issue to tuner (coax or ethernet)). I would guess people would get frustrated selecting airings and getting tuner/channel unavailable error messages, if that was not the logic. Thus, if a channel is not available on any tuner(s), then don’t show airings in the guide for that channel. When all channels are unavailable, the logic results in an empty guide.
Just some thoughts and guesses on my part. And you’re welcome. As I said, I felt your pain, and feel we are kindred spirits on the same journey, so I was happy to help! 
Hi Don - nice to hear from you again. Sounds like the diving/kayaking was good!
I did a bit of a test this morning, I unplugged the coaxial cable completely and then did a manual guide refresh. The program guide was fine, it pulled down a few thousand airings as it normally does. So it looks as though the guide refresh has no dependency on whether or not a valid signal is being received. This makes sense to me, I liken it to a standard TV, once you’ve tuned all your channels you don’t expect them to disappear completely if there is an issue with the signal.
I get what you’re saying and that could also be the case, but I don’t think that would be a very nice user experience. Better to say “hey, you should be able to get this channel, but right now there is a signal issue - check your cables/antenna and try again later”.
I’m still not really sure what has resolved this, but for now it still seems to be stable.
Do you have the default time frames for scheduled tasks? One thing I found was that sometimes the nightly scheduled tasks would take longer than the default time frame. Once I extended the allowed times I don’t recall having any further incidents of missing guide data.
Hey John - I must have the default times, it’s set to start at 2am and finish at 5am. I don’t think that is my issue as I definitely had it disappearing during the day as well, outside of this window. But thanks for your input
Sounds like you have the more frequent updates option turned on if it is disappearing during the day. You could try turning that option off temporarily, extending the time window for Scheduled Tasks and check for 4-5 days to see if the Program Guide data stabilizes. Then turn on the option for more frequent updates. I know there is a patch either coming for the guide data or possibly in the last update don’t recall which at the moment.
Ahh yes good point, I did initially have that option enabled, but I turned if off a few weeks ago in an attempt to troubleshoot this issue. I’ve been stable now for about 12 days…so things are looking good.
A quick update. This has been solid since my last post, however after putting up the christmas tree this weekend, which necessitated moving the tv and therefore the aerial cable, I noticed that my Program Guide was once again empty. I double-checked my coax connections and they all seemed to still be nice and solid, but, maybe something had been disturbed in the move.
