Thanks Nelson61 for a nice bit of history and analysis.
Reading the application to move was interesting. Dish said they did not intend to use the spot beam capability of E8, but that the satellite would give them the capability for (essentially?) full CONUS coverage. Reading between the lines, I guess this means Dish will use the spot beam capability of Ciel-2 when launched (November?) to fill up the holes in their local HD coverage. I don't recall exactly what the Ciel-2 spot beam capacity is, but I do know its a lot. Maybe we'll all have HD locals for christmas.
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fitzie