Dutch_12078 wrote:
Your location is never transmitted back to Dish from the receiver, no matter what is connected or turned on or not. You must personally contact Dish customer service via phone or chat to change your location to receive the local channels for that area. Dish just needs a valid address within the spot beam pattern to tell your receiver what channels it can receive. It doesn't even need to be your specific address, as long as it's within the pattern where you're located. The "locked on" requirement is so your receiver can receive the updated data it needs to allow you to see the channels in your program guide and select them for viewing.
Just for fun, let me add to it: your receiver has an address, like a phone number. Dish's satellite sends a signal to that address. It says, "Here's a message for receiver BR-549 - stop letting this fellow watch Valley Locals and start letting him watch Corpus locals instead."
Remember, your dish and receiver are already seeing lots of channels it isn't letting you watch - like maybe HBO or Spanish language programming that you aren't paying for. If you call Dish and say, "I want to add Spanish language programming" they will charge you and the satellite will send a message to BR-549 authorizing it to let you start watching those channels.
Or something like that.
