I found it was just as easy as the round 18" dish, we use the same home-made stand for the larger HD dish. I can usually have it darn close with just the compass, then turn receiver on and use on-screen signal meter to get sat signal over 90% on sat 101. If dish settings are correctly set and mast is level, all the other sats come right in delivering all the same channels we have at home. Most times it takes 5-10 minutes unless I have to shoot between the trees. Not sure about losing locals after leaving our zipcode as I can still get locals several hundred miles from my home, I guess some locations have tiny spotbeams although the Directv spotbeam map doesn't indicate such.
