upstatemike
Senior Member
I got the notice fom DirecTV saying I have to replace my dish and receivers soon or else lose my HD programming, and I am having trouble deciding how to respond to this. They say they will replace my dish and 4 HD boxes for free but I have some concerns...
1- The current dish has 4 coax wires running to it that I carefully fished through the walls and a series of crawl spaces to the roof. If the new dish needs a fifth cable run I seriously doubt if the installer is going to take the time to follow the same complicated path to the roof. I am also not excited about running another wire myself any time soon.
2- I really like my Sony HD300 receivers and have not heard good things about the new DirecTV boxes (poor UI, slow channel changing, etc.)
3- If I swap them I don't think I would own the new boxes but would instead be converting to a lease arrangement... sounds like a I'm giving up something in that deal.
4- My ReplayTV DVRs work great with the Sony boxes. If swap I would have to get new DVRs (not in the budget) or use the DVR Receivers from DirecTV which are not included in the swapout deal (so also not in the budget).
5- I plan to migrate to SageTV next year but it is not in my budget for this year. Whatever I do should be compatible with that long term plan.
6- I don't want to switch to cable because my local provider does not include Nasa TV and some other stations that I watch regularly.
So what options do I have? Let the DirecTV guy come do a hack job to get the new dish in and live with the receiver downgrade and no DVRs? Or leave things as they are and do without HD for now? (I can always rent Blu-Ray discs from NetFlix.) Is there another option I'm overlooking?
1- The current dish has 4 coax wires running to it that I carefully fished through the walls and a series of crawl spaces to the roof. If the new dish needs a fifth cable run I seriously doubt if the installer is going to take the time to follow the same complicated path to the roof. I am also not excited about running another wire myself any time soon.
2- I really like my Sony HD300 receivers and have not heard good things about the new DirecTV boxes (poor UI, slow channel changing, etc.)
3- If I swap them I don't think I would own the new boxes but would instead be converting to a lease arrangement... sounds like a I'm giving up something in that deal.
4- My ReplayTV DVRs work great with the Sony boxes. If swap I would have to get new DVRs (not in the budget) or use the DVR Receivers from DirecTV which are not included in the swapout deal (so also not in the budget).
5- I plan to migrate to SageTV next year but it is not in my budget for this year. Whatever I do should be compatible with that long term plan.
6- I don't want to switch to cable because my local provider does not include Nasa TV and some other stations that I watch regularly.
So what options do I have? Let the DirecTV guy come do a hack job to get the new dish in and live with the receiver downgrade and no DVRs? Or leave things as they are and do without HD for now? (I can always rent Blu-Ray discs from NetFlix.) Is there another option I'm overlooking?