satellite dish for camping

robsouth wrote:
I got my dish (Direct TV) at a yard sale for $5.00. Made a stand out of PVC for about $8.00. Take a receiver from home and voila..Satellite TV on the road. Basic service, but who cares, I'm camping not sitting in the house watching TV all the time.

We did basically the same thing, but we had a friend that had a rental house. The previous tenants put in Directv, but moved out. The owner called Directv and told them to come and get the dish. It's still there, so he calls me 13 months later and tells me to come and get it. I was there the next day and took it down. We had already made a PVC holder with a compass mounted on it as well as a level.

All in, about $15.00. We have 3 different receivers at home, so we have one that is designated for the RV during the spring, summer and fall and the daughters' play room during the winter months.

I got my dish (Direct TV) at a yard sale for $5.00. Made a stand out of PVC for about $8.00. Take a receiver from home and voila..Satellite TV on the road. Basic service, but who cares, I'm camping not sitting in the house watching TV all the time.

The entire basic Dish satellite system for our motorhome cost a bit less than $250, including the receiver and tripod mounted manually aimed dish. A typical complete setup takes me about 15 minutes and we receive all three satellites with no need to move anything.

We use the little manual MP1 and take our Dish Network
receiver from the house. Point to 129 for HD and 119 for our local channels. The dish was $160 and I pay nothing extra for the service.

I recently set one up. It is the Dish 1000.2 that gets all the channels. I am using it with a Hopper and/or a 211k in the RV. I have tripod that I use to use on a smaller dish and it was wobbly and unstable. So I got an adapter that fits a CST/Berger survey tripod. It is rock solid, very stable and steady and that makes it easy to find the sats. It also can be used on uneven ground. Only takes a couple minutes to set it up. The adapter (or the whole thing) is sold by www.tv4rv.com.

We have the Dish tailgater and love it. Portable and set up is easy.

Moved from Forum Technical Support

The service technicians that set up our DISH at the house sold us a second "dish" and tripod. I learned how to set it up, marked the post, and use a compass to get everything lined up with magnetic north. Set up is relatively easy after you set it up the first time and make your base-line "tick" marks on everything. We use one of the receivers from the house. The "dish" on the house and the "dish" in the trailer are identical.

When I was doing it I used a two port ROUND DISH for DIRECTV (You would need one for the DISH Network).

Then I run a RG cable from each of the two ports on the SAT DISH to two SAT RCVRs I brought with me from my house.

One SAT RCVR is in the living room TV area and the other SAT RCVR is in the Bedroom Area.

Then I run VIDEO CABLEs from each SAT RCVR to the VIDEO INPUT on each TV in the trailer.

This way I can select either SAT TV or regular CABLE/OTA TV by using the TV REMOTE...

Worked great for a few years but when the NATIONAL BROADCAST came out with their digital TV signals from the local towns I stopped bringing along the SAT TV stuff... We now watch full blown high def digital TV for the NATIONAL BROADCAST TV channels coming from the local towns where we are camping using the OTA BATWING antenna on the trailer. HDTV is free to the public and is easy on the eyes...

Roy Ken

I use the Winegard Anser, whichis "semi automatic". You only need to set the elevation (simple) and the unit finds the satellite. I chose this because it lets me use my dish dvr from home, and is capable of watching a different channel on each tv.