I still have the old 8ft mesh antenna that we had before DirecTV. What fun it used to be to try and keep that puppy locked on one of the satellites during a storm..LOL We had it converted about 12 years ago to receive DirecTV, but it would only pick up one satellite at a time, so we nixed it when they started using multiples. However, it was hardly ever affected by rain/clouds.
It seems like the HD broadcasts are more affected by rain/clouds. We have had a lot more outages since we switched to HD compared to what we used to have with the smaller oval dish with a dual LNB.
Hughes was the company (parent: GM) that owned the satellites. RCA had the exclusive on the consumer recievers at launch time and when that expired, other companies joined in. Hughes Network Systems released their own product and we were one of the original distributors for that, along with thier DirecPC internet product which gave way to DirecWay and now HughesNet. I loved my DirecPC back when everyone else was using 56K modems. LOL
Your issue with outages on the HD stuff could be related to a marginal installation. You can go into your setup menu and view signal strength readings for all transponders on all satellites. Any that are in the 80's and below are much more likely to drop out during heavy rain. Are your other channels more susseptible to outages now that you went to HD? The whole dish gets replaced to you're starting from scratch as far as dish alignment goes.