this is an ongoing saga about how to use their satellite. If you want to get NBC, CBS, ABC while on the road, you need to receive the local channels at the location where you are camped. IE, you are camped for a couple nights at one campsite, and then drive 250 miles to another campsite, and so on. My question is what do you do to get the local channels at each location?

I no longer have Dish, but we had the same experience. We just simply used over-the-air for local stations. As far as "back home" news goes, our cell phones have app's for our local news stations. That keeps us informed about weather and mostly what's happening at home. But the local over-the-air is what we did.FYI, we originally had Direct TV. They kept jacking up the prices till it became outrageous. We switched to Dish TV. They did the same thing after. After 2 (plus) years of constantly fighting to keep costs down, and finally their best offer was still too outrageous, we dropped them too. We are now just over-the-air antenna tv! Much happier now. And really ... (I can't believe I'm actually saying this)... who needs television when camping anyway! Paid-for-television and over-the-air television is really nothing but garbage: senseless reality shows, violence, and sex. And everything is just re-runs, and paid movie channels play about 5 movies a month and just keep repeating them. It's all mindless garbage in MY OPINION. For the price we were paying, we were not getting any benefit out of it.

Ditto over the air for DirecTV in our camper.

DirecTV will change your "service address" to your new location, but they get testy if you try to do that more than once or twice a year. And as often as not, they'll also wind up changing your billing address. Best way is to get an outboard DirecTV AM-21 off-air tuner (about $50 lots of places) that uses your crank-up TV antenna to add any local off-air channels to your DirecTV guide. Works great. If you have a separate DirecTV account for your RV (or if your only account is an RV account, you can do the paperwork and subscribe to DirecTV's "Distant Networks" service that gets you either east coast or west cast network stations for about $15 a month. Don't expect the DirecTV phone talker who answers to know about the distant network service - most of them don't. Do your research on the web and you'll be fine.al

Or you can call DTV get a form and subscribe to DNS; Distant Network Services. Nationwide beam. You can get NYC or LA in standard def. NYC east of the Mississippi in HD or LA west. I dont know what they are charging now I dropped it years ago and live OTA with a Winegard Sensar Pro.

DutchmenSport wrote:We just simply used over-the-air for local stations.This ^^^^^^^Big Katuna wrote:Or you can call DTV get a form and subscribe to DNS; Distant Network Services. Nationwide beam. You can get NYC or LA in standard def. NYC east of the Mississippi in HD or LA west.Or, this ^^^^^^^^aslakson wrote:DirecTV will change your "service address" to your new location, but they get testy if you try to do that more than once or twice a year. And as often as not, they'll also wind up changing your billing address.Because of this ^^^^^^^^

DirectTV--getting NBC, ABC | Good Sam Community

DutchmenSport
Explorer
Oct 10, 2015
I no longer have Dish, but we had the same experience. We just simply used over-the-air for local stations. As far as "back home" news goes, our cell phones have app's for our local news stations. That keeps us informed about weather and mostly what's happening at home. But the local over-the-air is what we did.

FYI, we originally had Direct TV. They kept jacking up the prices till it became outrageous. We switched to Dish TV. They did the same thing after. After 2 (plus) years of constantly fighting to keep costs down, and finally their best offer was still too outrageous, we dropped them too. We are now just over-the-air antenna tv! Much happier now. And really ... (I can't believe I'm actually saying this)... who needs television when camping anyway! Paid-for-television and over-the-air television is really nothing but garbage: senseless reality shows, violence, and sex. And everything is just re-runs, and paid movie channels play about 5 movies a month and just keep repeating them. It's all mindless garbage in MY OPINION. For the price we were paying, we were not getting any benefit out of it.
Dick_B
Explorer
Oct 10, 2015
Ditto over the air for DirecTV in our camper.
aslakson
Explorer
Oct 10, 2015
DirecTV will change your "service address" to your new location, but they get testy if you try to do that more than once or twice a year. And as often as not, they'll also wind up changing your billing address. Best way is to get an outboard DirecTV AM-21 off-air tuner (about $50 lots of places) that uses your crank-up TV antenna to add any local off-air channels to your DirecTV guide. Works great. If you have a separate DirecTV account for your RV (or if your only account is an RV account, you can do the paperwork and subscribe to DirecTV's "Distant Networks" service that gets you either east coast or west cast network stations for about $15 a month. Don't expect the DirecTV phone talker who answers to know about the distant network service - most of them don't. Do your research on the web and you'll be fine.

al
Big_Katuna
Explorer II
Oct 10, 2015
Or you can call DTV get a form and subscribe to DNS; Distant Network Services. Nationwide beam. You can get NYC or LA in standard def. NYC east of the Mississippi in HD or LA west.

I dont know what they are charging now I dropped it years ago and live OTA with a Winegard Sensar Pro.
Bobbo
Explorer II
Oct 10, 2015
DutchmenSport wrote:
We just simply used over-the-air for local stations.

This ^^^^^^^

Big Katuna wrote:
Or you can call DTV get a form and subscribe to DNS; Distant Network Services. Nationwide beam. You can get NYC or LA in standard def. NYC east of the Mississippi in HD or LA west.

Or, this ^^^^^^^^

aslakson wrote:
DirecTV will change your "service address" to your new location, but they get testy if you try to do that more than once or twice a year. And as often as not, they'll also wind up changing your billing address.

Because of this ^^^^^^^^
rr2254545
Explorer
Oct 10, 2015
Big Katuna wrote:
Or you can call DTV get a form and subscribe to DNS; Distant Network Services. Nationwide beam. You can get NYC or LA in standard def. NYC east of the Mississippi in HD or LA west.

I dont know what they are charging now I dropped it years ago and live OTA with a Winegard Sensar Pro.

DNS has been $15 per month for at least 5 years from Direct TV
ReneeG
Explorer
Oct 10, 2015
We have Dish. If we are staying in one spot for several days, we call in and give them the local address or zip code. If only one night or tow, we don't bother. But we just bought a Winegard RAYZAR Air OTA antenna add on and will be installing it to see if that gives us another option. Especially when we can't get satellite signal due to trees.
RoyB
Explorer II
Oct 10, 2015
We totally vacated our small SAT TV setup of bringing along a SAT DISH and SAT RCVR from our DIRECTV home account. This is standard SAT TV for us (NOT HDTV)...

Since the NATL BROADCAST came out with their free to the public digital high def HDTV signals a few years back we found that this was the best way to go for us. We get great reception of the digital HDTV signals from the local towns just about everywhere we go using our OTA BATWING antenna on a pole outside our OFF-ROAD POPUP. Your crank-up antenna on top of your higher trailers should do even better than what we are setup to do...

This digital OTA HDTV is full blown high def as compared to the standard TV signal format we was getting from the SAT TV setup...

Of course we are only getting the ABC-NBC-CBS-FOX and a whole bunch of PBS HDTV signals but there is plenty to watch including live 24/7 radar channels and lots of movies channels. Of course all of the NCIS type natl broadcast channels haha...

We sometime will downstream a couple of the CABLE type shows we love to watch from the internet like TNT-USA-Halmark etc but this will get into your internet data plans big time... Plenty of free places on the internet to do this...

I notice that DIRECTV and AT&T have teamed up now providing SAT TV (ALL subscribed channels) over the internet which may be something we might look into providing the internet cost is not too much... I'm not sure how this works yet...

Here at the house with unlimited data we watch free downstreaming TV shows all the time on our cellphones/tablets/home computer setups... This is how I catch-up on the ones I missed...

Roy Ken
sdianel_-acct_c
Explorer
Oct 10, 2015
we are full timers and subscribe to the affiliate channels. We get NY stations on DirecTV. When we are at home base we get the local affiliates.
We also get over air channels local channels by scanning our front TV and by using a digital converter box on the BR TV as it's still an old analog TV.
Executive45
Explorer III
Oct 10, 2015
Call DirecTV and subscribe to DNS. You can download the form on their website. Cost is $15/month and you can ask for either east or west coast but not both, due to FCC regulations. (some have grandfathered both but it's no longer available) When you subscribe, also ask for the FREE RV setup. You may have to ask more than one person or ask for a supervisor. This free setup consists of a dish/tripod/50'cable.. They don't advertise it's availability...Also, if you have a stix n brix account, you cannot have DNS without a separate DirecTV account per federal regulations...below is a link to a pdf file explaining all of it........Dennis

http://www.directv.com/learn/pdf/DNS_Vehicles_Aff.pdf