Ok, problem solved. Salti and Wa8yxm were on the right track. I did leave out one important step. I thought I was doing it by tuning to channel 60 but I needed to go into the channel search somehow and select it I guess. Dish rep told me thought it was the tv's coax connection and we went back and forth on that as I was pretty sure it wasn't. Then in the process of proving it to me he stumbled on the channel 60 thing and got the picture to come in clear. Kind of amazing that after 15 years (and one winter up north) the connections are still good. They even found the remote code for the tv. I spent hours trying to find one that worked and they had it sorted out in about 3 minutes. So I am good...to...go. Thanks for all the time and imput. Sorry I wasn't cluing in.
So, for anyone finding this in the future -- it was an old black cube tv. I had it on 72 cable and it needed to be on 60 air. Initially when I did that ll I got was snow, but that was because, as Salti noted, I had to go into the channel search on tv 2 and change the setting there as well (switch from cable to air for one, not sure what else he did in there)
