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My brother, who lives down in Hawaiian Ocean View Estates, is looking at getting satellite tv service soon. His house is located out of Oceanic Time Warner's service area, so thats why he is looking at getting satellite tv.
It seems there is much more dish network installers here on the Big Island than directv. At least when I looked in the phone book that was case and when I looked online.
So if anyone can give me some helpful hints, I'm all ears.
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My neighbor and I got tired of the rain fade with Dish and ordered Direct. [
]When the installer came out and showed us the equipment and where it could and couldn't go we both canceled the order. [V]One thing the Direct TV satellite is lower on the horizon. So much lower that the neighbor was going to have to install a tall 20' tower about 150' from the house [:0]to mount the dish on because his other neighbors trees were blocking the horizon if the dish was put on the house. The reason I canceled was due to the mounting options. Right now the Dish is on an eve of the house where the cable wires come out. The new dish is too big to put on the roof (do to wind loading problems) and the installer tried to convince me to let him put it in the middle of the yard! That was NOT acceptable. [V]
The other reason I wanted Direct TV, is they had a better package of channels available. Dish requires two dishes to be installed to get the extra channels that Cathie and I want to get. That gets expensive. If you call Dish you get the "No problem, we'll set you up and only charge you $49.95 plus the upgrade" Right!!![
] Then you get the "Gee... You're in Hawaii" speech. That is going to cost more![
!] I started to do this with Dish last year and talked to the local installer. At that time he said Dish was getting ready to make some changes to their systems and that it would make living with rain fade a little better. I called him again after canceling with Direct TV to see when thing were going to change. He told me that the changes are to be going into effect sometime this month or in April. As it is now programing comes from two different satellites to get the two extra channels we want. The main change is the signal strength is going to be boosted to help with the rain fade. There was more to the story but It just went in one ear and out the other. I'm going to call him again at the end of this month and see if there have been any changes yet. Sorry for the long post and hope it make sense.[?]
Royall
What goes around comes around!
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I have 2 giant monster dishes in my back yard, ugly[xx(]....and when it rains it blacks out and sometimes- at random- channels are just plain missing. I loved direct TV on the mainland but it is not the same system here and does not work nearly as well. I am just biding my time until cable gets here - I'm on a waiting list in HPP. I'm told the wires are installed but we can't get it yet for some reason.
Good Luck!
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I use to have both Dish and Direct. Now I have neither. The commercials were longer than the programs.
Now its just "on-My-demand" DVD's and reading a good book! Both are commercial free!
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quote:
Originally posted by Royall
My neighbor and I got tired of the rain fade with Dish and ordered Direct. []When the installer came out and showed us the equipment and where it could and couldn't go we both canceled the order.......
We are having the same issue down here. Direct TV had better programming for the cost but cant get a signal. And we were told that they dont/wont put it up on a roof.
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macuu222,
Ditto for us. No tv for several years.
I love old movies and good, non-commercial programs, but won't allow the other stuff in the home environment.
Aloha,
Lee
http://members.cruzio.com/~lionel/event
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We have Dish. We are happy with the service. You can get a DVR with your package that allows you to record and then skip the ads.
We have tried a bunch of local installers, and Pahoa Sattelite were definitely the best.
I don't much like DISH, the only one I've dealt with. My only comparison is with Time Warner Cable, which is so much better (but I realize not an option for you).
I don't like their customer service, and I don't like that the non-local channels are on Pacific Time, so by our prime time the other channels have all gone to infomercial.
If you have a DVR, you can deal with that by recording, but if you're a person who likes to browse, you will have little to watch after 8pm HST. In my experience. Not sure how Direct handles this.
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Dish is good, the picture isn't grainy like time warner, yes you need two large dishes for HD, but the signal is stronger with the bigger dishes. You get all the local chanels in SD and HD in real time, Plus local chanels we can't pick up over the air on the big island. Only thing is you will want to get an HDTV to go with it[
]
We have had some trouble with a couple of channels but over all it seems to be good. However Time warner is nice when you need to rewind live TV...
Daniel R Diamond
Daniel R Diamond