Dish or Direct TV

This is like asking Ford or Chevy you will get all kinds of responses.
I do Direct because it is what we use at home so i have no additional cost.
We love it and we use our over the air all the time.

If you have one at home, simply buy the appropriate dish and take a receiver from home with you. Been doing that for years. Once you get out of local spot beam you loose locals, but hey......

We use DirecTV primarily because it has channels that we like that Dish doesn't - or at least did the last time I looked.

al

berreez wrote:
I’m looking at the options on satellite receivers and providers.
1. Has anyone used pay as you go? Since we will be gone for 4 – 6 months I thought this could be an option.
2. Or, if I have Direct or Dish service at home can I use this in my RV and at my house?
3. Which service is better for HD?
4. Can you also get internet (email) through the receivers?

I have had both Dish and DirecTV service over the past ~20 years. As an RVer I would say Dish is the better choice. Dish provides HD video over the smaller dishes and domes; DirecTV only provides SD on those smaller dishes and domes... and reportedly SD is eventually going away.... so it depends largely what type of dish antenna you will be using.

Dish Pay-as-you-Go service works well for RVers who need that type of service. It is no contract so you do not use an auto-pay system... you pay for the service individually by the month.
I have concluded that if you have Dish Service at home, it is far simpler to just add your RV's Dish receiver to your home account as a second receiver. This cost's only 7 dollars per month, currently.... and works out to be both cheaper than Pay-as-you-go, and slightly simpler when dealing with customer service. The negative side is that you cannot get locals on both the RV receiver and Home receiver at the same time so if you are leaving someone home to watch TV while you are RVing, one of you will not have those locals available.

The Dish ViP211K and ViP211Z are the RV receivers of choice if you don't need more than one TV channel to view at the same time. A standard USB Hard Disk can be added for recording TV.... at a one time cost of $40. I don't think DirecTV has a similar option....could be wrong there.

Full two-way Internet is NOT available over either of the services.... and I don't know if the old one way system is still operational... but you would need a phone line for the other half anyway... which is not usually available while camping. You'd probably be better off with a cellular internet connection with your cellphone service.