The thing I dislike about Rick's site is that unlike this board, where there is a "What's Up There?" forum that's not indexed by search engines, he encourages everyone to post anything they find right out in the open. I don't know if he has actually been responsible for any feeds becoming encrypted, but to me it doesn't seem like a responsible way to run a forum. The funny thing is he'll censor posts for other reasons that he doesn't clearly define anywhere (I think just whatever offends his sensibilities) and you won't know you've crossed the line until your post disappears, but one of the types of posts he'll always remove is if you suggest that people should be more careful about what feeds they post out in the open. So, I personally would seek out another source for any receiver I was interested in, because I don't think he's doing our hobby any good by calling attention to feeds that should probably only be spoken of in hushed tones. That's just my opinion, FWIW.
That said, a receiver would have to be really good before I'd consider spending that kind of money, given all the less expensive alternatives available on Amazon and eBay (both the ones we are allowed to discuss here and the ones we aren't). I know some of those are made very cheaply and don't have AC3 support, and I'd avoid those, but even so that receiver seems a little bit overpriced considering that every receiver I've ever bought was rendered fully or partially obsolete after a few years, at least in the post-analog era. Sure, my old Pansat will probably still pick up DVB-S signals, but then DVB-S2 8PSK came along, now we are seeing 16APSK and 32APSK, and probably soon everyone will want 4K output. But then I'm not the target market, since I'm using a PVR backend system with tuner cards, so the only way I'd probably actually use a receiver is for blind scanning and checking signal quality/strength. The only way this type of receiver might interest me today would be if it could stream its tuner outputs to the network using SAT>IP, which would mean TVHeadEnd could use it as additional tuners, but so far I have not seen any indication it has any such capability. But even if I didn't have the backend system, I'd have to be truly impressed with a receiver before I'd spend a couple hundred on it given all the other available choices. The one thing it does have going for it is it appears to have dual DVB-S2 tuners, which means that in theory you could have a C-and a Ku-dish attached, or you could run both outputs of a dual output LNB into it and watch or record from two different muxes simultaneously, so that alone will probably help sell a few. But it won't receive 4:2:2 (though it may be able to record it, if so you'd just need to play it back on something else that can play 4:2:2), so that's a downside.
