I forgot to mention another advantage of keeping a deactivated purchased Hopper: you can continue to have access to all of the recordings that are on the internal hard drive. (External hard drive recordings would still require active service on the same account from which they were originally stored.) With a leased Hopper, you would either lose all recordings when you cancel service, or have to pay a hefty non-return equipment fee to be able to keep them.
I still can use my deactivated hopper for ota recordings . I kept it hooked up after I cancelled last December and it continues to work . I can even get auto skip on my ota locals like I could the satellite locals. I also have a ton of movies on external hard drive that I can still access.
That is good to know. I remember reading posts from people who put their service on "Pause" (paying $5 per month to keep the account active) who could not access recordings from any external hard drive. Yet now someone who no longer has a Dish account active at all can still play them. I should have remembered from my own experience that I have been able to transfer recordings from a deactivated Hopper to an external hard drive and successfully play them. I still had active programming on my account with a different receiver at the time, though. So, I assumed that having the account active somehow kept the EHD authorization active even though the Hopper itself was not active.
That must have been a long time ago. As I recall, they started leaving OTA enabled on deactivated receivers when All American Direct started offering service on Dish equipment. So, there may have been cases where the receiver was no longer active for Dish service, but was still being legitimately used for some service. After All American Direct went out of business, Dish never changed the OTA authorization requirement back to what it had been before that.
Haven't on mine. I thought it would become a useless brick but it didn't. The Joeys also work connected to the hopper. So ota can be used in all 3 rooms.
No the account has been deactivated as of last December when I cancelled. I didn't change the setup in any room . So I can use the Joeys in the other 2 rooms for ota as well. So I was surprised that I could still keep it hooked up and use it for Ota and to watch my external hard drive full of movies. But I did pay for the receiver and the ota usb adapters, so maybe they don't have that many receivers that are purchased around the country so they don't care about it.
I know someone who will be glad to hear that. Have you read HopperGenie's recent threads in this forum?
And that is total BS!!! That is the one part of the purchased equipment price chart that people actually took pictures of, and posted in the thread I linked earlier. Here is one such post:
www.satelliteguys.us
Wow! That’s good news that the joeys work because I’m about to buy a hopper 2 with 1 super Joey and 2 normal joeys.
Yes I did, but I don't know how successful he will be with his setup.
Do you have experience with wireless joeys? I found a better deal which contains of a hopper 2 a wireless access point 2 and a wireless Joey
Very interesting. I recently had one of my Lifetime TiVos die. I could buy a used Hopper 3 on eBay with an OTA dongle and it would be similar to having a Lifetime TiVo.
I would think you would have to be activated ,so you could add the ota dongle. It won't let you get very far till you authorize it through DISH. Buy your own receiver and get DISH for a month and then cancel if you want. Then you ota should continue to work. But I can't guarantee it will work that way for every one or their situation. I had my DISH account for 25 years and was on pause the last 6 months. I don't know if they forgot to turn the feature off or they changed the way it will work from the older Vip receivers. I also have an old deactivated 211k and the built in ota tuner does still work for live ota reception, but the dvr feature doesn't work any longer because they turned the external hard drive off when I deactivated it.
