I replaced two Hoppers with Sling and two Joey's with a Hopper 3 and two Joey 2's. I was on the DIRT Hopper waiting list, but ended up requesting the upgrades through online chat. I get my Dish service (billing) through my phone company & thought it would be easier that way.
The tech got everything set up last Tuesday. He was scheduled to show up between 12 and 5 PM but called after some cancellations and showed up in the morning. Good thing, because Wisconsin had a major snow storm hit in the afternoon. My wife was home and everything went well enough. When I got home, the old dish was sitting next to the garage, and the Hopper and Joey were hooked up. One complaint about the tech. This is almost laughable. The Hopper in my living room was replaced with a Joey 2. I had the Hopper in an entertainment center, and there was an extension cord in the entertainment center for plugging in the Hopper, TV, and Blu-ray player. Not sure what exactly transpired, but the tech HAD to unplug the Hopper from the extension cord, and somehow between that unplugging and getting the new Joey hooked up, seemed to forget where to plug it in. No lie, when I got home, I found that he had plugged it into the end of a string of Christmas lights my wife uses to light up a potted plant! The first order of the day was to plug it back into the conveniently place extension cord.
The H3 and Joey 2's are working fine. I had to unplug the H3 to reset it because I wasn't getting the video from the selected channel. The guide and sound were working, just no video. The restart fixed this. I also had to switch USB inputs for my EHD before the H3 would recognize it. I have the new H3 displaying on a 106" screen from my projector. The picture appears to be about the same as the old Hopper. I like the quickness of the H3, but had no complaints about the speed of the H2. Before switching to Dish, I had DirecTV and actually made the switch BECAUSE of the snails pace that old POS DTV receiver operated at.
All in all, I'm please with the upgrade. I like the new GUI of the H3. It seems more integrated to me, if that makes any sense. I'm not a fan of the new downsized remote, but spend most of my time in my theater room, where I used a universal remote.
Things on my to-do list:
- I need to do a little bit of reprogramming of my universal remote. A couple of the buttons have changed with the H3. Live TV comes to mind.
- I still haven't figured out how to do a seek style timer. Not sure if that's the right description, but I used to have (GB Packers fan) timers set up for football; "at Packers", "Packers at", "at Green Bay", and "Green Bay at" to capture all the games without all the random fluff.