Stupid Newb Questions

[Gant]

I live just south of Kansas City. I've had DirecTV for over 10 years and am really happy with it. I've got a 5 LNB dish and an HD-DVR. Here's my problem. I'm a huge hockey fan and would love to be able to watch HNIC, TSN, etc to keep up with things. I've got Center Ice, but other than the games themselves you can never see any highlights or stay on top of things.

Over the weekend I thought with hockey season starting I'd see if there was some way to get Canadian programming in Kansas. That brought me here. I've read through the posts and a lot of it is over my head.

My brother in law is an installer for Echostar so I could have him help me install a second dish. I guess my questions are:
1) What general direction would the new dish point? My DirecTV dish is pointing south.
2) Is the picture quality decent this far south?
3) If I handle the installation myself, how much can I expect to spend to get the hardware and programming?

I'll follow the general guidelines in this forum on who to contact for help when I decide to make the plunge.

Thanks for your patience and sorry for the long post.

 

[joshuals]

There are basically two satellite services in Canada: Bell ExpressVU and Starchoice. By the letter of the law, neither is supposed to provide service in the US. However, as you can see from this Forum, there are plenty of people in the US who have service from one or the other of these two providers. In order to obtain service, you must have a Canadian address that the provider refers to as a "service address". If you have friends/relatives in Canada, their address could be used. If not, there are brokers that will, for a nominal fee ($50-$100/yr) provide you with an address and they will take care of setting up your service with the provider, and will handle all your dealings with them. They will likely set you up with paperless billing with direct billing to your credit card. This will avoid your having to deal with the provider directly. If you do try to deal with them directly, you run the risk of having the customer service rep ask you where you are located. If they learn that you are receiving their service outside Canada, they may be forced to disconnect you. Though others might disagree, I would advise you to use a broker and don't tinker with the possibility of being asked a question for which you wouldn't have a "good" answer. If you pay your credit card bill every month, the likleyhood is that you will enjoy the service without being disconnected

In the US, Starchoice seems to work much better than ExpressVu for a variey of reasons, not the least of which is that the footprint of their satellite beam extends much further south. I live much further south than you, and the Star Choice picture quality is excellent. If you read the posts in this Forum, you will see much about Americans losing signal on certain transponders, etc, with Bell. This does not seem to happen with Starchoice. And, Starchoice seems to be less "unfriendly" towards Americans receiving their service.

Starchoice uses two satellites at longitude 107.3 & 111.1, so from your location, the dish would pointed somewhat west of due south (at an azimuth of about 200 degrees)

I recommend you refer to the following website and click on "the Canadian Solution". Though the site used to contain much more information than it does today, I believe a call to the phone number listed on the web page could answer all your questions and go into more detail on what I have written above. Mr. Kohl has proven to be very reilable and helpful.

Good luck....

http://www.global-cm.net/

 

[Gant]

Excellent information. Thanks so much!