Got my Hopper 3 two days ago, 3/9. I ordered at a Dish booth at the local Home and Builders Show down at the St. Louis Convention Center. I wasn't intent on going with a Hopper 3 since I just upgraded last August with a Hopper w/sling and 2 wireless joey's. I didn't think I would qualify for any deal but the agent who was there said let's call and see. As it ended up the only out of pocket requirement was to carry the maintenance for 6 months. I thought that was okay so we placed the order.
The install was relatively painless. The installer first replaced the LNB on my existing dish which is aimed at the western arc. I asked whether he was going to re-aim east, like most of the new installations around me are, and he said no. He said the HD bird would be lower on the horizon than the western alignment and I'd be more susceptible for HD outages in bad weather.
Once done with the LNB change out he replaced my solo node in the basement with another splitter. He didn't give it a name, but that was a pretty quick change out.
After that point it was a matter of changing out the old Hopper with the Hopper 3 and pairing the existing wireless Joey's with the new Hopper 3 and getting their software updates. I have an external Western Digital 1TB USB hard drive and had backed up all my programming on the old Hopper. He noted that connecting that drive would be one of the last things he would do since the set up diagnostics have been shown to fail when an external hard drive is connected too early.
I had backed up my old Hopper timers onto my 40.0 controller. I asked if I could keep that even though we had the new 52.0 controller with the Hopper 3. He said yes and I asked him for help to restore those timers to the new Hopper. He seemed unfamiliar with how to do this on the Hopper 3 and ended up backing up the Hopper 3 to the 40.0 controller which essentially wiped out the backup. He connected the old Hopper back up to power and attempted to pair the 40.0 controller to it. It wouldn't pair so he pulled a new 40.0 controller off the truck and paired it up with the old Hopper. He did a backup to it and then paired that controller to the Hopper 3. This time he did things right and restored to the Hopper 3 and we got all the timers loaded. He plugged in the external drive and we began the transfer process to move selected programming back onto the Hopper 3 drive.
So far I've been very pleased with the new Hopper 3 and I'm getting more familiar with the UI. My wife uses the 40.0 controller and I use the 52.0. She made comment that the picture on our Mitsubishi seemed to be brighter and sharper. I thought the same and made some slight adjustments with the TV to bring down a little of the harshness. I've not discovered any "bugs" yet in the UI and overall I think Dish has a winner here. I think the thing I was looking for the most was the extra tuners. We have about 27 timers set and while we don't really have issues with same time recordings, the early one minute start and 3 minute extension times we have set on the timers caused conflicts with back to back recordings when we were viewing other programming. I know I could have changed those parameters but I do find that extra time has helped get complete recordings of programs.
Jack
The install was relatively painless. The installer first replaced the LNB on my existing dish which is aimed at the western arc. I asked whether he was going to re-aim east, like most of the new installations around me are, and he said no. He said the HD bird would be lower on the horizon than the western alignment and I'd be more susceptible for HD outages in bad weather.
Once done with the LNB change out he replaced my solo node in the basement with another splitter. He didn't give it a name, but that was a pretty quick change out.
After that point it was a matter of changing out the old Hopper with the Hopper 3 and pairing the existing wireless Joey's with the new Hopper 3 and getting their software updates. I have an external Western Digital 1TB USB hard drive and had backed up all my programming on the old Hopper. He noted that connecting that drive would be one of the last things he would do since the set up diagnostics have been shown to fail when an external hard drive is connected too early.
I had backed up my old Hopper timers onto my 40.0 controller. I asked if I could keep that even though we had the new 52.0 controller with the Hopper 3. He said yes and I asked him for help to restore those timers to the new Hopper. He seemed unfamiliar with how to do this on the Hopper 3 and ended up backing up the Hopper 3 to the 40.0 controller which essentially wiped out the backup. He connected the old Hopper back up to power and attempted to pair the 40.0 controller to it. It wouldn't pair so he pulled a new 40.0 controller off the truck and paired it up with the old Hopper. He did a backup to it and then paired that controller to the Hopper 3. This time he did things right and restored to the Hopper 3 and we got all the timers loaded. He plugged in the external drive and we began the transfer process to move selected programming back onto the Hopper 3 drive.
So far I've been very pleased with the new Hopper 3 and I'm getting more familiar with the UI. My wife uses the 40.0 controller and I use the 52.0. She made comment that the picture on our Mitsubishi seemed to be brighter and sharper. I thought the same and made some slight adjustments with the TV to bring down a little of the harshness. I've not discovered any "bugs" yet in the UI and overall I think Dish has a winner here. I think the thing I was looking for the most was the extra tuners. We have about 27 timers set and while we don't really have issues with same time recordings, the early one minute start and 3 minute extension times we have set on the timers caused conflicts with back to back recordings when we were viewing other programming. I know I could have changed those parameters but I do find that extra time has helped get complete recordings of programs.
Jack
