Condo4life said:
You know how you see all those commercials (of cable company propoganda) saying that one must always tinker with "the dish" to fix the signal. Is that all hogwash?
Yes, it's all hogwash. E*'s commercials even talk about the cable pig
If the dish is mounted with twistie ties from a bread bag, yeah, there'd be trouble. Duh. Mounted anywhere near correctly, like with screws, it's a non-issue unless you're in a hurricane or something. Or course, DBS (little dish) is not perfect. Twice a year, you'll get 15 +/- minute outages during the day for around a week - of course, it only affects 1 satellite at a time, so changing channels can help, and depending on what and when you're watching, you may never see it. I've been a satellite user for many years, and it's never bothered me.
Heavy weather can be an issue - at least if you're in a fringe area. I have to occasionally sweep the snow from the dish. Trivial - as long as it's mounted where you can get to it.
As for cable, they use the same feeds as DBS - note the big dishes at the cable head-ends. They're receiving the same signals as the old-time BUDs (Big Ugly Dish) that we used to have.
Cable has it's own set of problems - backhoes, traffic accidents, and stupid installers working down the street can all knock you offline. Once your DBS is setup, none of that can hurt your signal.
Of course, both systems can be affected by equipment failures at either end. The DBS head-ends are pretty bulletproof. All their eggs are in one basket, and they take care of the basket. Cable company head-ends vary wildly in quality and maintenance, and when they fail they can be down for hours to days. The only thing that can do that to DBS is satellite failure, and they've got spares already in orbit. Last dead bird I remember was a long time ago, and it was a C-band (BUD) bird. They moved the traffic around pretty quickly - I don't remember getting aggravated over it.
One thing to consider is your internet access. Cable access can be nice - as long as it's not overloaded, which is a typical problem. WiFi can be good, but also can have loading issues. Satellite internet access (which is what I have) has some drawbacks beyond loading issues. DSL is relatively immune from all of that - at least for the last mile. However, if the DSL provider doesn't have enough upstream bandwidth, it acts the same as an overloaded cable or WiFi feed. Basically, you place a bet and hope it works for you - and will continue to work a year or two down the road.