I remember that ever since the OTA dongle for the Hopper was introduced until the point that I left Dish it always said "This feature is coming soon". Well "soon" never happened as long as I was with Dish. I left Dish for DirecTV in July of last year. Out of curiosity, did Dish ever enable that feature?
Did Dish Network ever enable the "add locals" feature for the OTA dongle?
- Thread starter edisonprime
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Maybe we need to pepper Dish on Facebook and Twitter with requests for this feature to be enabled.
In order to view your locals OTA with the Hopper OTA adapter you must run a scan, like most digital tuners.
However, the Hopper software does not allow you to adda single channel, by tuning to it as you can do with all the VIP OTA tuners, you must run a full re-scan.
This is particularly a problem for those who have stations in different directions that use a rotator, the rescan in direction B will probably erase all the stations you scanned from direction A and vice versa.
It also makes it impossible to do any DX-ing or other fun type stuff.
However, the Hopper software does not allow you to adda single channel, by tuning to it as you can do with all the VIP OTA tuners, you must run a full re-scan.
This is particularly a problem for those who have stations in different directions that use a rotator, the rescan in direction B will probably erase all the stations you scanned from direction A and vice versa.
It also makes it impossible to do any DX-ing or other fun type stuff.
I didn't word that very well.
If you have stations in different directions, one north and another west that are receivable, you have to mount your OTA antenna on a rotator to move it from north to west when you want to view the other OTA station.
Back in the "good 'ole days" when TV was analog and most every station was VHF, we lived in a small town in SE new Mexico that had 3 "local" stations, I use quotes because one of the towers was in town (ABC ch 6) but the other two were 51 (CBS Ch 10) and 73 (NBC ch 8) miles away.
Everybody had a fairly tall guyed push-up mast on top of their house and could pull in all three stations.
We had a 5 section push-up guyed mast with the Finco antenna pictured in my avatar on top and we had a rotator on it so we did not just have to point the antenna north for CBS and NBC out of Roswell, but we could point it NE and occasionally pick up Lubbock stations from 170 miles (very fuzzy without an occasional boost from tropospheric ducting) or turn the antenna SE to get stations out of the Midland/Odessa area. We didn't even have coax, all the downlead was twisted twinlead antenna wire, which we recently have learned is really lower loss than 75 ohm coax, but that is another tale for another time.
If you have stations in different directions, one north and another west that are receivable, you have to mount your OTA antenna on a rotator to move it from north to west when you want to view the other OTA station.
Back in the "good 'ole days" when TV was analog and most every station was VHF, we lived in a small town in SE new Mexico that had 3 "local" stations, I use quotes because one of the towers was in town (ABC ch 6) but the other two were 51 (CBS Ch 10) and 73 (NBC ch 8) miles away.
Everybody had a fairly tall guyed push-up mast on top of their house and could pull in all three stations.
We had a 5 section push-up guyed mast with the Finco antenna pictured in my avatar on top and we had a rotator on it so we did not just have to point the antenna north for CBS and NBC out of Roswell, but we could point it NE and occasionally pick up Lubbock stations from 170 miles (very fuzzy without an occasional boost from tropospheric ducting) or turn the antenna SE to get stations out of the Midland/Odessa area. We didn't even have coax, all the downlead was twisted twinlead antenna wire, which we recently have learned is really lower loss than 75 ohm coax, but that is another tale for another time.
We had a rotational antenna when I was a kid back in the 1950s. My Dad had the electrical rotation motor mounted on a plumbing vent on the roof. Wasn't a good mount, caused a roof leak around the vent.
Yes, I would thank after all this time that they would of added this feature. THe older 722k/722 and 211k can do this with ease,but not the cutting edge hopper. Then again they also do name based recording on all ota channels and the hopper can't on sub channels, thanks to the software update last May. The software writers seem obsessed with the applications and not fixing bugs, that they create when they keep trying to add new features.
OTA dongle (when fixed) will let you rotate the antenna and add one channel at a time without erasing the other channels that are in other directions.
I wonder if the "fix" would require everyone who owns a dongle to have it replaced, that it can't be fixed remotely with a software update? Even if they create a new dongle with that feature, perhaps the risk of financial hit of customers asking for free replacements would be too high to risk even trying.
Just a couple of wild guesses in there...
Just a couple of wild guesses in there...
Very unlikely. This is nothing more than a user-interface issue, i.e. a feature that Dish chose not to implement (yet).
I'm 99% certain that the "software writers" don't decide what features, applications, etc are implemented. People in departments outside of 'engineering' tell them what they'd like to have or want, the engineering says "yes, it's possible" or "no, it can't be done", and then projects are prioritized.
But, if the logic is housed in the dongle, it might not be a simple case of doing a "firmware" update remotely...that's all I'm saying.
I doubt that is true. Otherwise we would not have any fixes for previous OTA problems.
The sub channel recording issue is something that was introduced much more recently... They were recordable before....
Dish's engineering group knows it is broken. Refer to my post # 15 as to why it's not fixed yet. Hint: Someone above the engineering team has probably given other things a higher priority.
