Another Direct TV question

I assumed it would be more difficult but it really isn't, especially if you have practice with obtaining the original SD signal. I purchased the same HD sat we have at home from Ebay and mounted it on the very same homemade stand the 18" round dish used for years.

Using our receiver and zipcode/city where we are camping we set the sat dish parameters accordingly and just use a compass to acquire sat 101 like we did for years for the standard SD signal. If mast is relatively level and settings for hd dish are properly set the rest of the satellites come right in. A bit of minor tweaking to get a 90% or better signal and we're good to go.

Whole process takes about 5 minutes if there are no obstructions to the southern sky, maybe 15 minutes if having to shoot between the trees. There are devices that can help with that situation and smartphone apps that have specifics for pointing your dish and a compass that can simplify the process.

Since we RV predominately in the 4 corner states we rarely have to adjust dish parameters, using just our smartphone apps I can get the dish pointed pretty close to spot on without even having the receiver fired up. Like anything else in life it takes a bit of practice to master, once you get the hang of it and find a routine that works for you it simply becomes part of the set-up process we all have when arriving to our destination.

Acampingwewillgo wrote:
how much more difficult is it to set up a portable HD dish opposed to a typical single lnb dish?

Quite a bit more, at first.

For starters, there are no beeps from the receiver like the old days. So, you either need 2 people, a meter, or, some way to watch the TV screen from outside. I use a Swift Hitch camera.

Takes practice. And even then sometimes it can take me 20 minutes. I find the hardest part is knowing exactly where the sats are and then translating that to the azimuth angle. It isn't always right where the DTV screen says it is. There are many phone apps to help locate, which I also use.

azdryheat wrote:
I thought HD came from 99, 101, 103.

It does, but once you lock on to 101, the skew setting takes care of the 99 and 103.

I thought HD came from 99, 101, 103.

Your still looking for sat101 so the hard part from that point is skew(twist) all of the numbers are still on the genie setup menu. BTW is your system wired or wireless? It will make a difference if you have more than one TV in the RV.

Acampingwewillgo wrote:
Anyways, how much more difficult is it to set up a portable HD dish opposed to a typical single lnb dish?

It's not very difficult after the first few times setting up. If you want to make it as simple as possible, go to www.tv4rv.com and purchase their heavy-duty tripod setup. Using their system makes setup a breeze.

Bruce