Hopper OTA dongle is great receiver

[larrykenney]

I've had the Dish OTA dongle for a while and thought it was a good sensitive receiver, but today I did a comparison test against the six other receivers in the house: Sony XBR5, Panasonic Viera, Insignia converter box, Axion 7-inch portable TV, 12 year old Sony XBR2, and the Fusion/Dvico USB tuner on my laptop. I fed the same signal into each receiver and checked all of the stations, looking closely for the weaker stations that are 50 to 70 miles away, the ones that sometimes come in, sometimes don't. Conditions seemed to be about average this afternoon when I did the comparison.

Here's the results:
1 - Dish Dongle - it produced a picture for four stations that all the other receivers showed "No signal" on. Showed "No Signal" for only one station that I've received before and had scanned into my list. I have 79 channels shown in my list.
2 - Panasonic Viera - Received all but 5 stations.
3 & 4 - Tied - Sony XBR5 and Insignia converter box - Didn't receive 7 stations.
5 - Axion portable - Didn't receive 8 stations.
6 - Fusion/Dvico USB tuner - Didn't make a picture on 9 stations, but added four to the list when I scanned that were too weak to receive PSIP info. It logged them with their RF channel number.
7 - Old Sony XBR2 - Missed nine of the stations when I tried rescanning and then showed "No signal" on three more that were already in the scanned list, so it missed 12 stations!

One thing of note... it appears that receivers keep improving all the time. The order shown in the results is pretty much in line with the age of the receivers, so the newer ones seem to be able to pull in the weak signals and/or reject multipath better than the older ones.

Thanks, Dish, for producing a great receiver!

If you want to check out some pictures of my antennas that I use for OTA reception, take a look at: http://www.larrykenney.com/tvantennas.html

Larry
SF

 

[Kent4499]

Sounds great. Do you use an amp?. I used an amp but discovered that the dongle works better without it. I have a long cable run about 100'. Most of my stations are 50 miles or more. I have a yagi antenna. Do you think a eight bay antenna would work better. I know I haven't given you any tech info I was just wanting your general opinion. Thanks

 

[larrykenney]

I can't use an amp. I'm too close to Sutro Tower here in San Francisco and if I add an amp the RF from the local stations overloads my receivers. I have tried a couple of amps and both worked best when the amp gain was turned all the way down.

I've found the 8-bay Channel Master CM4228 to be an excellent antenna for UHF. I've got two of them. Both are the older style, not the new 4228HD. It has good gain all across the UHF spectrum. I get better reception of the Sacramento/Stockton UHF stations from Walnut Grove, about 65 miles away, than I do the two VHF stations that transmit from there. For VHF I'm using a 10 element yagi.

Larry
SF

 

[Barry Erick]

Don't use an amp, but my Samsung receiver has a better OTA than the dish and both get exactly the same feed, via a splitter with exactly the same outputs and cable length to both. Unless they changed recently, the TV has the revision 2 ATSC in it and the OTA has Revision 1, which is not superior.