Switching From DTV to Dish With Camper

RoyB
I'm interested to hear what kind of antenna do you use to pull in the HDTV signals? Is it directional?

This is what I'm trying to figure out...

Lets say you pull into Anytown America RV park.

Lets say you have no idea the number of HDTV stations you can get or their direction.

I would assume you would need some kind of HDTV antenna that can pick up HDTV signals from ANY direction.

You place the antenna & then set your TV to scan ALL channels (looking for stations).

Correct?

I would think that if you had a directional antenna you would NOT be able to pick up ALL HDTV stations UNLESS all the transmitters are in the same location.

Let's say your facing north and you DO KNOW that their is an antenna at 1:00, 5:00 and 11:00. I would think an antenna that that was directional would not be the one to use.

Duchmen Sport;

Would you please go thru the steps you take, from start to finish on how you setup your dish with the 3 LNB's.

I have a single round manual crank up dish on the motorhome with one of those elevation readers. Real easy to get the direction/elevation off the DTV box and then dial it in. Takes me about 1 minute to get "locked on".

With the HD dishes I know that you need the direction/elevation but how to adjust skew?

Thanks

We switched from Direct to Dish this last year and am very happy with Dish.

We have the exact satellite dish on the house as we have for the camper. The only difference is the way it's wired. The dish has 3 eyes, and in the house, all three eyes are connected to their own cable that feed to a 3 way connector. And from there, a single line runs through the house.

On my dish for the camper, I have only 1 line connected to one eye. (The middle one right now). Sometimes, I'll switch the cable to a different eye, depending on where we are it just works better sometimes. I don't understand the mechanics behind it, all I know is, sometimes it just works better that way.

We have 3 receivers in the house. One is a dual receiver, which stays permanently. It's got so many wires attached to it, I'd be lost if I ever unhooked it.

The other two are single receivers in guest bedrooms. We take one of those receivers with us in the camper. If we have company at home, we can either run a line from the house to the camper, or set up the stand-alone dish. Either way, one of the receivers goes in the camper.

The people who installed DISH for us, also sold us the dish and tripod. We've been very happy with this arrangement ever since.

The biggest issue with Dish is that the programming (in most of the US) comes from 3 satellites. If you want to use your single LNB antenna you will only be able to select programming from one of those 3 satellites. If you don't mind paying for an automatic portable antenna it solves this issue by automatically moving to the required satellite when you change channels.
You can buy the multiple LNB open faced antenna and this also solves your problem but it takes more time and patience to setup since you have to locate all 3 satellites simultaneously.
The Hopper will not work with any of the domes style antennas so you would have to use a Dish 1000.2 open face antenna on a tripod or buy an automatic roof top antenna like the Winegard Trav'ler.

Many people with Dish do take one of their receivers from home to the RV when they travel. And you can use a simple tripod sat dish with it.
I opted to buy an additional receiver to keep in the RV rather than move one of the home units back and forth each time we go. Thru dishformyrv.com it added $7/mo to the home account. Later I bought a Tailgater to make life easier when setting up the system on the road.
Don't have the Hopper so can't comment on it.

I use to do the same thing on bringing along a bedroom SAT RCVR and a portable SAT DISH setup and watch our DirecTV account anywhere in the USA. It sometimes was a hassle finding the correct SAT to make it work and of course we always lost out LOCAL Directv stations whenever we got a ZIP code away from our house.

Then when the NATL BROADCAST came out with their digital HDTV setup the quality of the TV was very good so we switched over to it using our OTA Batwing antenna setup fining the signals from the local towns. We never bring along our Directv items anymore unless it is for a long term stay.

The OTA HDTV is full blown high def digital TV and we get 6-36 digital stations just about anywhere we go here on the east side of the USA. We sometimes have to get pretty accurate on pointing the BATWING antenna and getting then scanned into the HDTV setup but all said it works rather well for us.

If we want to watch some of the cable TV stations we use to get over the SAT TV we just downstream them over the internet. We don't do this very much as we have a low 3GB DATAPLAN with our internet provider but if you wanted to do more of this there is the MILLENICOM MIFI setup that will give you a 20GB dataplan using the good Verizon internet network.

I like what we are doing with the local OTA Natl Broadcast stations using our BATWING setup as they are free to use and full blown wide screen digital high def TV signals. We like to watch the national broacast Tv stations anyway... Hard to beat this...

This was a good alternative thing for us...
Roy Ken