I am considering purchase of a DirecTv dish, described as follows on EBay:
NEW Direct TV HD TRIPLE LNB Satellite Dish DirecTV FTA
I currently have a SD DirecTv subscription and use one of the early RCA receivers.
Is there any reason why I could not substitute this dish for my current dish, which is an early single LNB model? I assume there is backward compatibility of this dish with my equipment, but just wanted to be sure.
Thanks very much for your help! Frank
Why would you want too? Are you planning on going with a HD rec soon?
It is probably compatible but you should consider that the current line of DirecTV dishes are 5-LNB slimline units and the older antennas won't work for their newest satellites which are being put into operation this month.
I need this dish for a second vacation house that I have. I will shuttle the receiver back and forth between houses. Are these 5-LNB units to be used excusively to receive HD programming or for more SD? I guess what I should do is get the 5-LNB dish for my principal residence, since I may go to HD some day and am there the lion's share of the time. I would then move my old dish to Maine as it will be used rarely. Does that make sense?. Thanks very much! Frank
Makes sense to me. Why would you want to have to go up the ladder again to place a dish when you inevitably upgrade at some point in the future? Considering the small difference in cost, I'd put up the better dish now and save myself the trouble later.
I think it's just a matter of time before TV is all high definition anyway. People used to talk about color TV the same way they talk about HD today... and look how that took off!
Don't put the dish where you need a ladder to access it.
Mount the dish on a 6' pole anchored to the ground like a fence post. Or bolt to a deck railing. Easier to adjust, easier to remove snow, easier to take down.
The difference between 6' and 16' compared to 25,000 miles is insignificant.
Call someone who installs DTV HD and ask them to be sure but I would assume there is backwards compatibility from at least one of the LNB's. I've been a DTV customer since 2000 btw. Also i have a friend who dabbled with installing a DTV HD unit and he had one hell of a time setting the dish up. You may consider getting a pro to install it if all possible.
Mine is on a post in the back yard, just as you've suggested. However, I've had to trim a hell of a lot of vegetation out of the way to keep a clear view of the bird. Had I mounted it up on the back of the house I probably wouldn't have had to do any of that.
One particular annoyance was losing the signal in the rain. Not rain fade, mind you... the water would weigh down branches and then they'd droop down in front of the dish. It wasn't always obvious which one was the offender and you had to go out in the rain to fix it. If you waited until it stopped raining then the branch would dry and spring back to its normal innocent position. A real PITA. I finally fixed it permanently by cutting the whole damned tree down. No more signal loss in all but the most torrential of downpours.
had
I've seen dishes installed looking /through/ roofs on houses with a high pitch roofs. Often wondered how bad the signal suffered during a downpour on these installs. Mine looks through a large tree about 100 yards away and I suffer signal loss during severe storms in the summer.
There is no self install anymore. All of the equipment is owned by them. You buy the service and they send someone over with the equipment and to set it up.
The satellite to dish distance is insignificant. The height of this (dish-sat) line at the dish end isn't. That could make the difference between a good signal and no signal because of a tree in the way.
You can go to Best Buy or any other chain store offering DTV and purchase DTV components and install them yourself.. Or you can order new service and not pay for anything.
The 5-LNB antennas are used to access the two new satellites but I don't know if these are to be used for HD exclusively. One quirk is that the new antenna weighs at least twice what the old ones did and presents a lot more wind load than the old ones because of their greater area. And to top it off DirecTV won't just let you have an antenna to install yourself as they did with the old ones -- they send out a technician for a no-fee install. There is a big backlog, at least in my area, and the closest appointment I could get was 45+ days from the request.
As chance would have it my installation call was this morning and it took the tech at least two hours to get the antenna in with the larger mount and bracing. I had installed a pair of new cables myself when I bought the new HD DVR receiver so that didn't come into it. The technician did have quite a time getting a good aim on the antenna. His default aiming settings resulted in a really good signal on the 101 satellite which is used for setup but as he was "fine tuning" the aim the antenna flopped because he didn't have the elevation and azimuth (and maybe rotation) bolts tight enough and it took a long time to get back to where he was. But it was probably worth it for the new HD standard-package channels.
My error, you can getjust a few items such as a replacement receiver. The new install systems and all of the dishes etc are all factory install only.
Current DTV HD setups consist of the 5-LNB dish, WB-68 multi-switch, H-20 receiver, and an add-on B-Band converter. The 3-LNB dish will work for some HD content, but not all.
DTV rolled out new HD channels at the end of Sept, none of which are accessible with the 3-LNB dish. What you have is folks dumping their 3-LNB dishes on ebay because they upgraded to 5-LNB.
DTV is planning to have 70 HD channels by the end of Oct. and 100 channels by the end of the year. I have the current DTV HD setup, and the HD looks
*sweet* on my 42" Plasma.
Why not switch to the Dish Network and get free equipment and installation?
---MIKE---
When did this happen? Three years ago I installed a four receiver system at my father's beach house. The receivers all belong to me.... I got them at Best Buy, along with the dish.
I needed to be the one to do the installation, rather than them... otherwise they'd have discovered that my father didn't live in a nearby city as he claimed. He wanted local stations for City X, 20 miles from his home. Because he lived in Town Y, they said he lived in a different demographic viewing area and he would have to get local stations from City Z... 70 miles away... a place he never goes. Unacceptable.
So we fixed him up with a dummy mailing address; he gets the locals from where he wanted; DirecTV gets paid online every month. Everybody's happy. Nobody gets cheated out of money. But obviously their agenda isn't the same as ours. Too bad for them.
"Your error" is right. You can order triple LNB multi bird dishes from Circuit City for $99.99 for DirecTV. Do you need the URL?
I'd tell you how much Best Buy is selling them for right now but their web site is dragging ass.
You mean like this one?
Didn't know that. So you can't go to say Best Buy or similar store and purchase a receiver and dish and install it yourself? That's messed up :)
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