First Look: Dish Network's DTVPal Digital Converter

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Do tell. First I've ever heard of it. :confused:
Scrambled OTA has been around for years. There used to be a movie service called On TV back in the 70s that went almost nation wide. Some services used special antennas while others used sync inversion and other CATV technologies to scramble the signal. Conditional Access allows the content to be turned on and off at the will of the carrier.
 
I'm just dreaming that I can make an informed decision before spending my last coupon. It's not going to happen. This whole program has been sucked up into an informatoin vacuum. It is not just Dish, nobody is talking about the what, when, and where of their products. I almost wish I had been like the majority of buyers, just gone to the first store and got the only model they had, oblivious to the NTIA's claim of 136 other ones.
 
I'm just dreaming that I can make an informed decision before spending my last coupon. It's not going to happen. This whole program has been sucked up into an informatoin vacuum. It is not just Dish, nobody is talking about the what, when, and where of their products. I almost wish I had been like the majority of buyers, just gone to the first store and got the only model they had, oblivious to the NTIA's claim of 136 other ones.

Hear, hear!

The more I've looked into this the more frustrated I've become.

At this point, I'm about ready to go for the Zenith DTT901. I don't need the timers of the DTVPal, since I don't record. And while I much prefer the program guide of the DTVPal, I'm not ready to give up on picture quality just for that, and as near as I can tell, the Zenith's picture quality is noticeably better than the DTVPal.

Add in questions of hidden smart cards, firmware problems that probably would require a factory exchange to fix, etc., I'm just not willing to jump in on the DTVPal at this point.

It's a shame, because in many ways the DTVPal seems the more adcanced unit. But the current tradeoffs involved just aren't worth it.

At this point my current short list is either the Zenith DTT901 or the Tivax STB-T9.
 
(tap tap tap) Is this thing on?

What happened to the TR50 that was supposed to revolutionize OTA HD recording and watching???????
 
well I just got my DTVPal. Took all of 3 minutes to setup :)

pretty small box which is nice. Said "scan channels" and it scanned all the channels in my market (Minneapolis) and I entered time zone and zip and it downloaded the guide in 10 seconds and done :)

Only drawback is there is no way to change in the guide for the channels to go in ascending order. They go descending so it looks like this

29-2
29-1
23-2
23-1
17-5
etc

I'd like them to go in numerical order ascending. No way to change that :(
 
I haven't tried it, but you could see if renaming them changes the order within the guide. I think David Zatz answered this question, but I can't remember if it did or not.
 
Its SD but it seems to take the HD channel as is so you need to use the zoom function

example
my local NBC is HD but on the SDTV I get the "small box in the TV". If I hit "zoom" then it fills the TV
The subchannel is in SD and fills the screen as is

so I hit "zoom" once and all the HD channels fill in nicely. Didn't notice it yesterday until my local NBC during the news went to commercial and saw the infamous lite grey "Kare 11 HD" down the sides. The news is in HD
 
it's in there

partsman_ba found it
P. Smith found it

:blush:

I stand corrected. Guess I should have read back!!! Even I'm getting confused about who did what.

Very, very Sorry!!!
 
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