Need advice for TV reception

[gemini5362]

Golferdave78

Let me add a little bit to the above.

1. Sattelite dish is great for tornado or flood watch issues. If you are somewhere that you cannot get OTA signals the ability to get TV from sattelite dish is an important safety issue in my opinion

2. If you decide to get a winegard traveller get the version that works with DirectvHD. It is going to cost 3 or 4 hundred more. I wont debate which is the better provider dish or direct but if you get direct and the direct version traveller you can change over to dish at a later date if you want to and change the components on the traveller fairly inexpensively. If you buy the dish version winegard traveller then the only way to switch to DirectvHD later on is to completely replace the traveler which is pretty pricey.

3. Manual acquisition sattelite dishes are fairly inexpensive and give the same benefits as the winegard traveller. You can run them into the camper through your cable tv and tripod connections if you have them. There are several ways to use them. Some people put the dish on a tripod. some just sit it on a ground. In the campground I am in now there are three sitting on the ground on some bricks and one has been mounted to the ladder on the back of his MH. The disadvantage to these is you have to position the antenna manually. People that i talk to who have done this say it is not too hard to do. I know I have an app on my cell phone that points guides you on where to initially set it. With a sattelite finder that plugs into your sattelite you can fine tune it outside. The traveller works well and suprisiingly can find a signal through trees sometimes. I have a portable dish that I quit carrying with me because I never used it. In the last year I have only been in one area where i did not have any signal. In that instance I watched the hundreds of hours of TV i have stored on my hopper.

3. Dish does not recommend using their DVR systems in an RV. Direct does not either. I have three hopper DVR's from dish two at home in my stick and brick house. I had to replace one of them because of Hard drive failure. It was the one in the stick and brick house that was put on a shelf and never moved. The one in my RV is still working fine.

4. One of the earlier posters mentioned getting a waiver and getting National Feeds of prime channels. They mentioned directv and did not know about doing that with Dish. Dish does not have that capacity. Federal Courts got upset with them flaunting the rules and blocked them from ever issuing waivers. It is my understanding that to get a waiver for Directv you have to have an account in the motor home. If you have a stick and brick account you have to pay for a seperate one for your MH to get the waiver. You can get the waiver for the RV and then get a system installed in your home and just add those recievers to your RV account.
Instead of getting national feed prime channels just change your service adress when you stop somewhere. Both companies allow you to do that . You leave your billing address the same just change the service address. That will allow you to recieve local channels in the area you are in. In case of bad weather a good practice in my opinion. I spend a lot of time in Arkansas and Oklahoma both prime tornado country. This summer both of those areas have had a lot of flooding also. Having the Sattelite dish kept me aware of when it was time to find a hole in the ground to hang out in for a while.


There are some new OTA antennas that are easier to use if you go that route but they do not recieve any further than the winegard sensar does.