Switch Satellite Dish?

[CarpeDiem]

We use Dish and have a KING Tailgater Portable Satellite and two Wally receivers. I was speaking to another full timer recently and he is using the Winegard PA-6002 Pathway X2. He said he switched to it because it has a larger surface area for better reception and also it searches both the eastern and western satellites. I assume the receivers will work with the new satellite. I am not concerned about the cost so much as actually making the system better. What do you think?

[Morich]

I'm glad to see a post about this subject as it is one that I'm also having a fight with getting it right and I'm certainly lacking a lot of the info I need!
Our satellite experience has been somewhere between "okay" but not as good as wanted and terrible enough to wish we had not started. Initially we had Direct at a house where it was about the only option at the time and we made do with lots of rain fade, etc. but were able to set a small dish out when in the RV and used a small meter to set it up in something like fifteen minutes or so.
We moved , changed and eventually rebought an RV and decided we did not like the U-verse service at the house so thought we could switch to Dish at the house and carry a Walley for the RV.

It works but we are certainly not happy with it! Setting the Dish Tailgater is a total nightmare for us and much of the problem seems to be in the "automatic" process which slows things down so much and really leaves me guessing where the problem is and the idea of calling them is a real turnoff!

So can we swap a few items of info and maybe somebody who really does understand will come along to set me straight?

I assume you are having a struggle getting a clear shot at the sky and they tell you to have a clear view of the Southern sky? I'm getting a strange idea of what they are speaking of when they refer to "southern sky" as I see the satellites are at 110, 119, and 129 degrees West longitude. I plucked that info off the diagnostics of the Wally, so have to assume it is correct for pointing.
But doesn't that mean we need to point more SW until we get somewhere West of near Tucson? Seeing 110W as Tucson, 119W being San Diego and that leaves 129 way out over the ocean?
What is your info on where the Eastern and Western satellites are?

I'm with you on looking for better but first I feel like I need to find that person who knows (and will tell me) the correct answers! I have not found it in talking to tech support.
Our last call, we got one who could not figure out why we wanted to move the Wally and dish as she had never heard the term RV!

[CarpeDiem]

You are correct about the sat #’s. We use an app called SatFinder Lite that helps us move the Dish to the best location. But if there is no clear sky view you can only get partial or spotty reception. As I said, he told me with the larger Dish and ability to use western arcs we would get more reliable reception. We always remind ourselves that most of our issues are “first world problems” so many in the world don’t have enough to eat, so we are very blessed.

[Wayne M]

Before I had an RV with the Winegard Traveler I had the Winegard Carryout for my 2008 Winni that did not have a roof top satellite antenna. It received 110, 119, and 129 satellites but because it is a dome it received one satellite at a time. Once the dome was in a position with it's 40' power cord and level, finding satellites and switching between satellite was automatc and seemed fast.

There were a few times where the location was not as good as it should have been, with trees and such, but maneuvering the dome around a little fixed a lot of the problems. There were a few times where we could only get 110 and 119 but not 129, or 119 only but that was typically only for a night or two. I enjoyed the Carryout and if the situation arose where I needed a portable satellite antenna I would go for the Carryout.

Winegard makes several different mounts for the Carryout but we opted for the Tripod Mount. The carryout has two outputs for two TV's but be aware that it only receives one satellite at a time so both TV's need to be watching stations on the same satellite. Not a problem for us as we watched the same things anyhow.

Also be aware that if you use DirecTV with the carryout, or just about any dome antenna, you will not get HD. I'd recommend calling Winegard with any questions you may have about any of their antenna's. Dish has more than 110, 119 and 129. I have heard that 61.5 has been good for some places.

If you have a rooftop and want to replace it, the Winegard Traveler is the way to go. We love it.

Cheers!

[Morich]

I just did a download of the Sat finder lite and it does look like it will help a good deal with some of the pointing problems I have had. I have not actually used it to set the dish but looked at the app and see what one big problem was with the way I had tried to aim it here at the house.
Using the idea that I needed a clear open Southern sky, I set it precisely to point South which left it looking somewhat close to treetops but sometimes it worked and not others, so I went with putting it on the RV roof to try to get over those and it seemed to work but using the same idea at various campgrounds was not getting good results, so I was boggled.
With testing now with the app to guide me, I see now that it was not the trees but my neighbors chimney! When I moved to get higher, I also moved about twenty feet away and looking at where the 110 sat is located on the app, I now see plainly that I moved out of the shadow of the chimney!

And that brings up an idea of why one dish might work better than the smaller dish in the Tailgaters. From work on micro tower feeds, I know that the curve of the dish reflects the signal from different sections into the center stinger where it is collected to pass to the equipment. Larger dishes will collect a wider signal and give more chance of getting enough of that signal to make things work.
So a tiny dish like inside the tailgaters will have much more trouble collecting the signal that a larger dish like the standard home item or even better would be the super large dish we see around cable TV sites. The old C-band were huge and probably needed when first dealing with the idea of satellite broadcast for TV.

I'm guessing part of our problem may be the size of the dish we have? Smaller dish has to be pointed much more precisely than larger to collect enough data to work well, perhaps?

Does any dish work with the Wally we use? Not something I know about but it does make me question when I think of the process I go through to get the Wally started.
Do you have a long drawn out series of automatic testing before it agrees that all is set right?
Since the Walley powers the dish, will it work with a dish without the electronics in the Tailgater?
Sorry, I have more questions than answers!

[Twpinaz]

We have a portable King Tailgater Pro Dish with dual connect. It automatically moves to acquire the satellite. We put a king roof mount on and have a king sat backpack to carry it up the ladder when we set up the site. You can leave it permanently installed on the mount if you want or use a tripod on the ground. The roof mount was to have an unobstructed path for satellite. Majority of the time it will automatically acquire the satellite, but a few times we had to call customer service and give them our location. They have always been good to work with once you explain you are rving/camping. We have dish at home and only turn on the rv dish when needed through the dish app on our cell phone.
A few things to note about it. Even though you can connect 2 Wally’s you can only watch one satellite feed, real pain if traveling with kids and they bump you off a show to watch cartoons on a different satellite feed with no warning. Think dueling banjos, but with remote until you quickly discover this quirk. We thought once we acquired satellite feed we would be good to go and wouldn’t be able to change it easily or have some type of parental code to limit it.
One more item is you can hear it in the middle of the night slight whirling to keep aligned with the satellite as it is mounted on the roof directly over our bed.

[Wayne M]

Funny story: Years a go I tried carrying and open faced dish with triple horns. In San Antonio I was at a campground where sites were close together but the office would alternate spaces so it wasn't that crowded the time of year we were there. I got out the dish and set it up in the adjacent pull through. I must have worked 3 hours trying to get it to get all there DISH satellites.

I was hot and tired so I went in to cool of and have a cold one. I'm sitting there and I look ot the window and say, "Oops! I better go move that antenna before it gets real dark and someone has to have that site."

I go out and pull up the hold down stakes, lift the entire unit up and put it down behind the MH. (SW Sky was behind us.) Put the stakes in the ground in case of wind and thought to myself at the time that I'd just try again in the morning.

Went inside, sat down, looked at the TV.....What the heck! I had all three satellites.

Next time we went out and that set up took so long I went and purchased the Carryout.

Happy to have the Traveler now.

[creativepart]

When we had SAT TV at home we decided to have SAT on the RV, too. It made sense to share that account. First I started with a big manual dish on a tripod. That worked very well but was difficult to always find the SATs.

So we got a winegard CarryOut and a stand for it. That simplified finding the SATs. But never worked as well. After a while we got a smaller roof mounted winegard like the playmaker but that was slow, noisy and even less good in operation.

I think if I was going to use SAT TV the only good option is the TravLer type of full dish. It’s expensive but it actually finds, locks on to and uses all three SATs at once.

But is SAT TV a long-term viable service?

[Morich]

Originally Posted by creativepart

When we had SAT TV at home we decided to have SAT on the RV, too. It made sense to share that account. First I started with a big manual dish on a tripod. That worked very well but was difficult to always find the SATs.

So we got a winegard CarryOut and a stand for it. That simplified finding the SATs. But never worked as well. After a while we got a smaller roof mounted winegard like the playmaker but that was slow, noisy and even less good in operation.

I think if I was going to use SAT TV the only good option is the TravLer type of full dish. It’s expensive but it actually finds, locks on to and uses all three SATs at once.

But is SAT TV a long-term viable service?

This brings a question that has been bugging me for some time as electronics moves forward.
We seem to be caught up in a never ending spiral of spending far more and getting far less every day when it comes to TV.

First there was TV which required buying a set and watching commercials but those were limited by regulating the percentage of ads versus content.

Then we were told if we got cable TV in our town, we could pay a flat fee and not have to have ads all the time. So our local city officials okayed putting cables on the existing poles but we got ads anyway. Then those ads were more and more as things became less regulated.

Now we seem to be in the same quagmire with more and more ads and less and less content of any real value. The suggested solution is for us to buy more and more equipment, subscribe to more and more different services to actually get the programs which used to be free!

Perhaps the better choice is to replace the nutcases we let get us into this situation with their ideas of deregulating everything.

Satellite TV will only remain a viable service if it is required to do so!

I'm not too upset with losing TV service but it does make me really mad when I find electricity is dealt with in the same way in Texas!

[Wayne M]

As I stated, the Carryout was very good for us for 10 years.

I believe it is a viable system for the long term. Of course, I cannot define what a long term would be. My upset is the changes that the "companies" do that requires purchasing new equipment to get the new features, etc. Similar to cell phone manufacturers changing out the power connector charger so you have to by the new one with the new phone. I mean, how difficult is it to keep the same connector.

For satellite we had the VIP722 DIsh receiver. Took it from the house and operated it in the RV. When the trip was over we returned it to the house. We could not "claim" it when in the RV so we did not get "local" programs. We bit the bullet and switched to the DISH Hopper. Never miss a program with the ability to record 16 different programs all at the same time.

As stated, programs are riddled with commercials so having the ability to record and skip the advertisements is just great. I have timed up to 8 minutes at a time for commercials. In a 1 hour long program there is approximately 45 minutes of programs and 15 minutes of commercials. So nice to be able to skip them.

[lewisedge]

Originally Posted by CarpeDiem

We use Dish and have a KING Tailgater Portable Satellite and two Wally receivers. I was speaking to another full timer recently and he is using the Winegard PA-6002 Pathway X2. He said he switched to it because it has a larger surface area for better reception and also it searches both the eastern and western satellites. I assume the receivers will work with the new satellite. I am not concerned about the cost so much as actually making the system better. What do you think?

The Winegard Trav'ler Antenna is dramatically more powerful than any of the smaller dome antennas but is also dramatically more expensive. We have a Trav'ler mounted on the roof of our motorhome, but I also keep a Winegard Playmaker and matching tripod in the trunk of my toad car with 100-feet of coax in case I'm forced to park my coach under trees.

[TriGlider]

For those folks who are awakened in the middle of the night by your Wally resetting the domed dishes on your roofs, you can change the reset time. I have a Pathway X1 on my Navion that drove me crazy the first few nights. 3:00am wake up call. Look in the Wally menus, Power Settings and change the Daily Reset time from 3am to something like 6am.

[Morich]

Originally Posted by TriGlider

For those folks who are awakened in the middle of the night by your Wally resetting the domed dishes on your roofs, you can change the reset time. I have a Pathway X1 on my Navion that drove me crazy the first few nights. 3:00am wake up call. Look in the Wally menus, Power Settings and change the Daily Reset time from 3am to something like 6am.

Interesting point on the reset and not something I heard about.
So what is it that is being reset? Catching up for small difference in aiming?
Any more info on that?
The few times when I have gone to the roof with the Tailgater, I can see that the noise would be a problem if sleeping!

[TriGlider]

It’s when the Wally performs a check for firmware updates as well a programming guide updates. The X1 as well as my X2 both do the same switch check antenna recalibration and reset during this time. It’s wasn’t a problem until I mounted the X1 to the roof of my coach.

[Radioflyer]

Before retiring/ RVing my career was telecommunications (Cable-TV, Broadcasting... both use satellites). While I’m taking some liberties to keep it simple... the original commercial receive-only satellite dishes were 8 feet in diameter... and that was an amazing reduction from the prior 30’ diameter uplink/ downlink size requirement! Some of us may remember a few neighbors (in the country) having these 7’ ‘TVRO’ (TV Receive-Only) satellite dish! The size of the dish is very much driven by the spectrum area being used. To get the dish size down to a more friendly size for universal home installations (and our RVs) the spectrum segment/ frequency had to be moved way up (from 7 GHz up to 12 GHz) this is much higher frequency than the microwave relay towers/ antennas/ or our cell phone signals. Using such higher frequent allows a radically smaller diameter dish to focus enough signal to produce usable signal levels for our receivers... BUT JUST BARELY! It’s called ‘signal margin’ and our little portable receiver dishes done have hardly any! And to make matters worse... the reason this spectrum was available for direct satellite TV is because it was passed over by all other spectrum users! Why? Yes, it allied smaller dishes... but 12 GHz has high loss passing through moisture aka thick storm clouds, rain,... and tree limbs/ leaves (again high moisture content). With our razor thin signal margin under the best of clear sky conditions, it ONLY TAKES ONE Small LIMB in the way to block enough signal to cause our signals to drop below usable levels. It might also be helpful to know that satellite orbit slots are assigned just 2 degrees apart! So while we typically only see our three orbit positions that seem well positioned apart... other satellites (not necessarily using our frequencies) can be shoulder to shoulder!

So back to our challenge of setting up/ successfully pointing our dish... there is A LOT more precision required than most users may realize, and truly amazing the auto-pointing dishes do it so well... and maybe helps explain the tedious process of setting one up/ aligning it manually.

I have a roof mounted auto Pathfinder and a auto Winegard Carryout. I start with a Dish smartphone app that uses your current auto generated exact GPS location, calculates the exact location in the sky of their East & West satellites and plots them on the iPhone camera screen as I stand looking up in SW direction. I see my obstructions (trees, limbs, telephone poles, wires,, distant hills/ maybe with a cell tower exactly at the wrong place (for me), skyscrapers... all with the satellite icons superimposed on the picture. If there is ANYTHING blocking the path no matter how small... it’s likely to not be a good location because of the reduced signal margin.

So why roof mount(s) and portable? Well we mostly use our RV in Summer and in mid-Atlantic area (but same issues during our two yr zig-zag trip of Nat’l Parks) statistically the single fixed roof antenna was blocked a lot, with little ability to move up or back a few feet. Being an engineer/ amateur radio enthusiast, I added/ wired a second roof antenna mount location to give both forward and rear locations to better to clear satellite sight line. Helped some if just sparse tree limb issue, still didn’t totally solve all the blockage issues, so waited for sale and got a second auto portable dish (just didn’t want to climb up/ down on RV roof that much!

So while there is still some great RV parks/ parking sites I can’t get clear site line, for all three of East or West... I can usually get two of a three... so maybe no HD or some channels inaccessible. But getting to the final ‘best’ placement/ results is down to about a 10 min process... with the antenna auto point process taking half the time. Owe it all to the Dish app!

[creativepart]

Originally Posted by Radioflyer

So why roof mount(s) and portable?

I did this exact same thing. Small auto pointing dish on the roof and larger carryout in a storage bay for when camping in trees.

The twice larger Carryout worked really well and was not as effected by clouds/rain/snow. It was just a bit more hassle.

I too used an Augmented Reality App to see the SAT positions and what obstructions were in the way.

The only thing I liked about the roof mounted dish was not having to manually pull it out, set it on a tripod table and run both RG59 cable and 12v power out to where ever I could find a clear shot of the southern sky.

I don't do SAT any more, but if I did and had the room I'd say a full size folding oval dish on the roof with auto aiming, i.e. a TravLer would be my only choice.

[Wayne M]

I was amazed at our Travler the last time out. Dish seemed to be pointing through the branches of a tree and we still go all 3 DISH satellites.

[cef2lion]

I bought a Pathway X2 after my KVH TracVision got outdated. Shopped around. I picked the X2 because it could track eastern and western arcs. It has worked great.

I was using a dish 211K receiver. Last year I replaced the 211K with a Wally. A nice upgrade. I added a USB WiFi adapter. I just ordered a Dish USB Bluetooth adapter to use a headset. I have an external USB drive attached to record programs. The Wally only has 2 USB ports so I also ordered a Dish 4 port USB hub.

I installed a dish antenna in the yard behind the garage at home. When not traveling I put the Wally in the garage for use there. Dish was charging a fee turning the Wally off an on for the TV season. Since I use the Wally in the garage now I leave it active year round.

I would like to have a roof mount antenna like King that has the mount that allows you to quick disconnect and use it on the ground with tri-pod in case of signal blockage on roof. Save having to store the antenna while traveling. Not sure if King offers an Antenna that can track both arcs and comparable with the quick detach roof mount.

[Yoders2Go]

We are with DISHTV, have been for MANY years. First the Stix&Brix, and now the motorhome. Back in the day we had a ground dish. We didn't watch much TV. I wasn't good at plotting an asmuth on the range, either. We now have a front roof mounted Winegard Trvlr. Oh MY, what a difference!
We are full-time travelers so have been to all four corners and I can count on one hand the times we couldn't get a good signal.
The Trvlr is a bit pricey but every time I push that one button and it does it's magic connecting to all 3 satellites, I smile.
We bought it from Camping World and they installed it. I had to provide a receiver so they could test it. That was the only hard part.
We took the Hopper (I KNOW, right?) out of the house, and a DISH tech installed it in the MH. I switched to wireless Joeys for the other 2 TVs and got an access point from DISH to run them.
My Matrix never did work, I got tired of looking at the HDMI cable connecting TV to Hopper, so I got another wireless Joey and all 3 TVS are now connected wirelessly. DISH techs had to bump me up to advanced tech to answer that ? You do not have to have the Hopper connected, by cable, to a tv to work.
I have never had a problem traveling with the Hopper.
I hope this gives you enough info to ask more questions��.

[Yoders2Go]

I must be a SOUND sleeper! In 6 years of traveling with the Traveler and Hopper, I've never heard it move, on it's own.