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Name:
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Webmaster
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Subject:
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DirecTV Research - Lake Martin
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Date:
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11/3/2007 12:51:46 PM
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Thanks peruecreek for providing information about subscribing to out of market networks. It’s too bad about CBS as it can be difficult to get good reception that far away. I live in Knoxville, TN and people in Gatlinburg commonly get waivers from the Knoxville network affiliates because there is a mountain in the way. If you have provided a good faith effort to receive their signal but cannot receive it, they should provide a waiver. The negative part about out of market channels is you don’t get local news broadcasts for Alabama.
DirecTV offers local channels for Birmingham but NOT Montgomery. Four of the nine Birmingham channels offered are HD (NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX). The part of Lake Martin where your service is located affects your eligibility to receive a local channel through the satellite dish. They will probably validate your service address zip code to determine eligibility. I did some research on the DirecTV site and here is how it breaks down. Basically, if you don’t live in Coosa County you’ll have to find out your eligibility for the out of market networks (New York).
Zip Code: 35010 – Alexander City
– Coosa County: Yes (Birmingham)
– Tallapoosa County: No Local Channels Available
– Elmore County: No Local Channels Available
Zip Code: 36024 – Eclectic – No Local Channels Avaliable
Zip Code: 36853 – Dadeville – No Local Channels Available
Montgomery Zip Codes – No Local Channels Available
The ability to receive out of market networks (New York) is another matter. This may depend on your location. For example people in Eclectic are closer to Montgomery.
DirecTV receivers do have terrestrial RF input for local channels so you can receive ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS, etc. over the air seamlessly into the tuner. But you will get no better signal than you do now with your current antenna setup, everything the same. The reason why DirecTV offers local channels via dish in the first place is because most people do not want to go to the trouble and expense of an antenna. HD signals come from the same types of aluminum antennas that the 480i signals come through and HD signals are directional just like the old signals. So sometimes fine tuning is required with a rotator (or go outside and move twist your antenna manually). Basically all the old tricks apply here: Get a larger antenna, put it higher, tune by direction and add a powered signal booster. That’s about all you can do.
DirecTV now offers 70 HD channels and they promise another 30 by winter. You need to have their new receivers to get these channels as they stream in MPEG4 video format. Old receiving equipment supports only MPEG2 video. That basically means they can now compress video with better quality and get more channels in the available bandwidth they have allocated to them by the FCC.
DirecTV no longer allows other manufacturers to make their receiving equipment. Today, they prefer you to lease it from them. This costs no more money and can provide some benefit of inexpensive replacement your equipment fails. This HD upgrade to the new receiver comes with a new 5 LNB dish they call the “SlimLine”. But this dish is bigger than the older one and is more horizontally oval in shape. The new receivers are the HR20 (DVR), HR21 (DVR) and H20. The downside to this lease is DirecTV no longer is using the popular Tivo service for DVR functions (they wrote their own software).
The good news is DirecTV is much better about helping you with installations than they were in years past. Keep in mind that the installers are independent contractors and will install the dish in the easiest possible position for them. If you have a special installation requirement you will need to either check beforehand if they can accommodate you, find a contractor that can help you or do it yourself. For example they pretty much come out with a ladder to get on your roof and a posthole digger to put a pole in the yard. If you want your dish on your gable (requiring a bucket truck or lift) or hidden under a polystyrene rock (to abide by neighborhood restrictions), you will need to do some contractor research beforehand.
I have the HR10-250 made by Hughes. This receiver went out of production two years ago but it is popular because it is easy to upgrade capacity yourself and add features that DirecTV did not intend for you to have. It runs the Tivo software and this makes it popular too. These are sold new for $1,200 but the going price on ebay is only a couple of hundred for a used one. The downside of this receiver is it only picks up the MPEG2 broadcasts which amount to only ten HD channels. DirecTV is not going to offer the newer HD channels in the MPEG2 stream for any old receiver.
If you are interested in DirecTV DVR receiver hacks and capacity upgrade kits for the HR10-250 visit www.DVRUpgrade.com. By hacks I do not mean stealing service… I’m talking about adding features like web server remote programmability, extracting video from the drive and disabling callback functions.
If you want to increase your DirecTV DVR capacity, regardless of the model visit www.Weaknees.com.
Personally, after finding out my old receiver cannot receive 70 HD channels that are currently offered, I’m looking at an upgrade myself.
If you have further questions or updates to my information feel free to reply.
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