Help for a SageTV user thinking about moving to Dish from Comcast

[mikesm]

Hi. I am a pretty advanced SageTV user who currently 2 DCP501's equipped with R5000-HD mods, and a couple of HdHomerun tuners in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am increasingly having issues with the DCP501's due to some comcast firmware upgrades that have affected the WAF in a bad way. And comcast's HD quality has been annoying me with various issues resulting from their compression that are making me think about switching.

My preference would be to go to DirecTV (my sister's family has it and the quality is great), but I need the R5000-HD support for SageTV, and I can't get that with DirecTV. I can get VIP 211's with the R5000-HD mod, and support them in SageTV, but I have never had satellite before, so I have some questions for folks here. I have searched and think I know the answers, but before pulling the trigger.


1) I have all the tuners connected to my server in the garage. From what I can tell, it appears that each tuner needs a dedicated coax from the Dish switch. I have a ton of structured wiring in the house, so can I assume that my QS RG-6 will be adequate from the attic patch panel to my garage? Running new cable is really a pain, so I want to reuse the existing wiring.

2) If I wanted 3 or 4 receivers, I would have to reroute some wiring, since I only 2 RG6's free from the attic to the garage. I have an OTA and FM antennas currently using the other RG6's. Is it possible for me to combine OTA or FM on the RG6's from the LNB's to the garage?

3) R5000-Hd's are available for the VIP 211, but not the VIP 211K. Is there some functionality I lose in terms of programming with the 211 as compared with the 211K? Is echostar planning on launching Ka band spacecraft or doing something else that would obsolete the 211's?

4) How many antenna's would I need to install to get full programming access from the SF Bay Area? I see different posts on this topic. How big are the dishs I need for full programming access?

5) Sage supports DVB tuners for FTA access - are there issues with mounting FTA antennas on the same mount as the Dish TV antenna(s)?

6) I have read that the vip 211's reset every day at 3 AM or something like that. Is this true? Is there anyway to avoid them doing this?

Thanks!
Mike

 

[TheKrell]

1) I believe your RG6 will be fine.

2) OTA frequencies are multiplexed onto one cable with a pair of diplexers. I have 3 receivers, 3 cables, and 6 diplexers to do this.

3) I know of no difference between the 211 and 211k other than color and size. I do not believe these will become obsolete any time soon.

4) You would need 1 antenna for the 110/119/129 orbital locations. You will get either a 1000.2 or the newer 1000.4 with a Western Arc LNB assembly. You can Google those model numbers and get the dimensions. Either model has 3 outputs capable of feeding 3 dual-tuner Dish receivers. If you want to add a 4th receiver, you can either play games with Dish separators or else spring for a DPP44.

5) Not sure what you want to do. You can probably mechanically add antennas to a single mast. But Dish receivers do not have firmware to rotate a single dish as you do with FTA antennas; they all expect to switch multiple fixed LNBs. And the windage of such a combo would sure give me pause. You can hook up a FTA receiver or DVB-S PC card with a Dish switch. I have such a thing myself. But there is precious little that's still broadcast in the clear from Dish satellites.

6) You can change the reboot times to something other than 3AM, and you can try to keep the receiver "on" all the time. But I believe there is no way you can prevent the reset altogether.

 

[mikesm]

1) I believe your RG6 will be fine.

2) OTA frequencies are multiplexed onto one cable with a pair of diplexers. I have 3 receivers, 3 cables, and 6 diplexers to do this.

3) I know of no difference between the 211 and 211k other than color and size. I do not believe these will become obsolete any time soon.

4) You would need 1 antenna for the 110/119/129 orbital locations. You will get either a 1000.2 or the newer 1000.4 with a Western Arc LNB assembly. You can Google those model numbers and get the dimensions. Either model has 3 outputs capable of feeding 3 dual-tuner Dish receivers. If you want to add a 4th receiver, you can either play games with Dish separators or else spring for a DPP44.

5) Not sure what you want to do. You can probably mechanically add antennas to a single mast. But Dish receivers do not have firmware to rotate a single dish as you do with FTA antennas; they all expect to switch multiple fixed LNBs. And the windage of such a combo would sure give me pause. You can hook up a FTA receiver or DVB-S PC card with a Dish switch. I have such a thing myself. But there is precious little that's still broadcast in the clear from Dish satellites.

6) You can change the reboot times to something other than 3AM, and you can try to keep the receiver "on" all the time. But I believe there is no way you can prevent the reset altogether.

Thanks. It looks like I could use diplexers to carry the FM and OTA around on the same RG6.... Thanks for that info. Dual tuner units are not useful to me, as I am using the R5000-HD mods to have these act as SageTV tuners (SageTV is my DVR system, so I don't need the Dish DVR functionality).

Also, it appears that if I buy the Vip 211's (with R5000-HD mods in them), that I still end up paying the receiver fees. Am I missing something? If I buy the receivers instead of leasing them, do I get any contractual or financial benefits from doing that?

The drag is that Dish doesn't appear to carry Disney or TCM or ESPNU in HD... I was a little surprised that my local Comcast has more HD channels than Dish does. I don't really care about sports that much, but like old movies and my kids like DISN in HD.

But it looks like I can make my cabling work which is good. Why do the receivers reboot every day? Even my POS comcast boxes don't do that... If I powercycle them manually before the designated reboot time, will they still reboot? I am thinking I can configure my homeseer automation system to powercycle them using appliance modules when Sage does not have an active recording going on to avoid gaps in recordings.

Thanks a lot and sorry if I am asking obvious questions...

 

[TheKrell]

Also, it appears that if I buy the Vip 211's (with R5000-HD mods in them), that I still end up paying the receiver fees. Am I missing something? If I buy the receivers instead of leasing them, do I get any contractual or financial benefits from doing that?

Unfortunately you are not missing anything. The dratted additional receiver fee is unavoidable and will be $7 regardless of who owns the boxes. Since you are going to modify them, you will have to buy them. The only benefit purchase has is that you do not have any 2yr commitment. Oh and you can sell them if necessary and recover some of your sunk costs.

The drag is that Dish doesn't appear to carry Disney or TCM or ESPNU in HD.

TCM is in HD on Dish. Disney was formerly carried by Dish too, until they got into a carriage dispute and big legal battle. (Disney thinks we should all pay twice for the same channels.) I don't think ESPNU was ever on Dish in HD. But after the legal dust settles, I expect these channels to be on Dish some day.

Why do the receivers reboot every day?

That would take a Dish engineer to answer. But I speculate that the daily reboot is for garbage collection or otherwise work around unquashed bugs. Their old/simple receivers never did this. But the DVRs surely do. Why is this such a stumbling block? Just set the time to something convenient to your schedule. I think you can set a timer to turn the receivers on, e.g. at 6AM, and also you used to be able to set the inactivity timeout to some large value. Not sure if that timeout still exists.

 

[Jim5506]

I set the inactivity time out on my 211 to 8 hours and disable it anyway, then set an auto-tune timer for 1 hour after the nightly update (3 am) and my receiver is essentially up and running 23 hour a day.

 

[mikesm]

Thanks guys. I guess I am missing something about the reboot problem on the VIP 211. If the device is active (ie turned on and decoding video), will the reboot "alarm" at 3 AM or whatever it's set to still reboot the box? Or will it wait until the device is suspended to do so? If the latter, this is not that bad an issue I guess. What if my R5000 app is configured to keep the box active all the time? That is, not turn it off after a recording, but keep the tuner active. Will it reboot at the set time then?

Also, are you sure TCM is carried in HD? I don't see it listed here: HDTV - Dish HDTV Channels & HDTV Satellite Dish - DISH Network, but then I have seen some out of date HD channel listings on the DishTV site before so I may be looking at the wrong place. Most of the standard cable agreements (ESPN included) give you HD channels at the same price as standard def these days. It may be that Dish was trying to save money by grandfathering an old Disney agreement, but on modern carriage agreements, I am pretty sure HD is included in the base fee.

One other question - it appears that most, if not all the HD content Dish sends is in 1080i h.264 format. For ESPN and others with fast motion, do they send 720p instead, or is HD on Dish always 1080i?

 

[patrick80639]

At 3AM the receiver stops the broadcast and a dialogue screen pops up asking whether you wish to continue watching or allow it to shut down. It doesn't seem to matter how recently it was used, I see it every time I'm awake at that hour.

 

[mikesm]

Ugh... Hard for an R5000-HD to deal with that kind of message.

Also, in looking at some threads on the HD lite issue, am I correct that Dish is still downsampling it's HD to 1440x1080? I know both direct and Dish did this years ago, but I know the DirecTV guys have stopped doing that (I have friends who work there). I guess I assumed that Dish would follow course and do the same thing, but maybe I am wrong about that. If the quality is worse than what I am getting from Comcast I guess I should call the whole thing off.

 

[mike123abc]

At 3AM the receiver stops the broadcast and a dialogue screen pops up asking whether you wish to continue watching or allow it to shut down. It doesn't seem to matter how recently it was used, I see it every time I'm awake at that hour.

The DVRs reboot every night, you can change the time to something other than 3AM if you desire in the preferences. It is the update time.