Direct TV or Dish

[denochs]

Anyone using either of these satellite carriers on a pay as you go basis? The questions assumes you have your own equipment and no contract. When we are in our home park we do not need satellite tv since cable is included. However, we travel a lot and would like to have satellite available.

Dave

[palehorse89]

I have direct tv at home, 2 recievers in the coach, $4.99 per reciever per month. I shut them down for 6 months a year due to winter in penna. And the biggest reason i still work and cannot go west...........

[HeapBigEngin]

Can't vouch for Dish, but I've been with DirecTV for many years. Their customer service, for us, has been absolutely awesome. Our situation seems different from yours, but I give DTV A+++ for their service. And that seems to me to be very important when you need help with your system AND you find yourself far from home. Just MO....

[wa8yxm]

Where I'm not so thrilled with DirecTV cuss-some-more service.

However that said: DirecTV (NOT DirecHDTV) is fully compatible with DOME type antennas (These are one LNB either Single or Dual output) if your dome is a "Dual" (Meaning two outputs) then you can use 1, 2 or more DirecTV receivers or a DirecTV DVR 100%.
'
Dish, some domes (not all) are compatible with a SINGLE receiver, HD or not, (The only difference is a smaller selection of domes do HD) but only with ONE receiver.

Dish also has the monthly no contract pay as you go plan, DirecTV does not at this time.

[hamguy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by denochs Anyone using either of these satellite carriers on a pay as you go basis? The questions assumes you have your own equipment and no contract. When we are in our home park we do not need satellite TV since cable is included. However, we travel a lot and would like to have satellite available. Dave

We have Direct TV (Great CS from them) and 5 receivers. We use 2 in the RV when traveling so we dog rob the bedroom rcvr from the stick/brick. I don't use campground cable because it is usually bare bones and sketchy at best. Also, I hate to memorize channel numbers that often.

[lllkrob]

To answer YOUR question, Dish Network Distributors Pace International, and Winegard are the only vendors for the Dish pay-as-you-go programming. Do not contact Dish directly they will not know what you are talking about. You must contact one of these two vendors it makes no difference which one the pricing and service is the same. The pay-as-you-go programming works just as described on the vendors websites. Direct TV does not offer any thing like this at the present time and their HD programming is not dome compatible.

[denochs]

As an FYI for those that didn't know, I spoke to Direct TV today about my question. Assuming the CS person knows what they are talking about (BIG assumption), if you own your own equipment you can get any plan on a pay as you go basis. As an example, the Choice plan is $60+tax per month. That's right, no discounts. You can activate and suspend your account, paying only for the days you use it. Here's the catch, you have to pay a full month before they can issue a credit (makes sense they cannot credit what you have not paid for), then they will deduct the number of days you use it until you use up the entire credit even if it is over serveral months. Sounds like a prepaid phone.

Dave

[W4RLR]

We have no cable service where we live, and the DW used to work for a DirecTV contractor, so we have a houseful of receivers. Less than $5 a month for each additional receiver, so we have the receiver in the RV listed as being in a bedroom. For saving $5 a month, it's not worth my time or effort to authorize and de-authorize the receiver in the fiver. So we don't get HDTV with the dome, the batwing gets all the HDTV locals wherever we're at.

[doc]

Contact for my Direct contract said to take a unit from the house and put it in the MH when we travel. He said as long as the bill is paid they don't care where you use it. Said if I had prblems with the MH install, to call and he would come by and set it up. No problems however. Hooked it up and told the dome to find a satellite. Couple or three minutes later we got a signal. Our movie channels follow everywhere, but locals go missing over 150 miles (or so) from Atlanta.

[LarryInAL]

One of the considerations that I found in looking at DirecTV vs. Dish (although I can't comment on the pay-as-you-go situations) is that DirecTV can get all its channels off one satellite while Dish uses two. So with Dish I would assume that you would have to move your dish frequently if you want to hop around the channels. Even though your dome dish might be able to have those two locations preset with initial search, it would still be tedious to have to go activate the dome dish for some channel changes.

[lllkrob]

Automatic domes will switch from satellite to satellite automatically when the channel is changed. If you are using a Dish ground antenna it can be skewed (tilted) to receive all three Dish satellites at one time.

[Techie]

BTW - even though the dome auto dish will switch between satellites you won't be able to use a DVR with 2 inputs that way as it is very possible that each channel that you're trying to record is on a different bird.

We went with DTV and have a dual output LNB and by stayign with standard def can keep it on the 1 sat and record 2 shows at once.

[lllkrob]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Techie BTW - even though the dome auto dish will switch between satellites you won't be able to use a DVR with 2 inputs that way as it is very possible that each channel that you're trying to record is on a different bird. We went with DTV and have a dual output LNB and by stayign with standard def can keep it on the 1 sat and record 2 shows at once.

That's partially correct. With Dish Net most SD programs are on 119 with a few on 110 along with most foreign ( non-english ) lanuage channels. All of Dish Net HD programming is on the 129 satellite. Most domes, not all, have two feeds to allow use with two receivers or tuners.

[denochs]

Here's one more thing I learned about Dish TV yesterday at the Charlotte, NC RV show. The Dish people said if you buy their receiver ($149) and have your own antena (Tracvision dome in our case) you can do a pay as you go. Their catch is you pay for a full month at a time with no suspending in the middle of the month with subsequent credits. However, they do have less expensive plans starting at $39 as opposed to $60 per month for Direct TV.

One thing they (Dish) said I really like over Direct TV is you can use any single disk hard drive of 40 gig or larger for recording programs.

Dave