Upgrading Receivers

[luisortega]

Right now we have an HR23 and 3 SD receivers installed in fall of 2009. As we're upgrading the tv in our bedroom to an HD model I called DirecTV directly and was told an HD receiver was free with $20 shipping or an HD-DVR for $99 plus shipping. After poking around under the "My Account" area, there was a link under the "My Equipment" area that said we were eligible for a free HD-DVR upgrade. After clicking on that and adding it to my cart it was showing as free with no S&H and simply nothing owed except the $6 lease fee.

So I went back and added in two more, I called DirecTV again to ask why I could get 3 free HD-DVR's from the website and although the man I spoke with was very nice he didn't really have an answer. I completed the checkout process while on the phone with him and the order went through. The installer is scheduled for Tuesday morning.

We have a SWM dish already, there's a four-way splitter in the attic that is not green label. What I'm interested in doing is sending back 2 of the SD receivers and keeping one. From what I've read so far, with 4 HD-DVR's and 1 SD that will put us at 9 tuners total and we'll need a different SWM or something? The HR23 we have now is connected by ethernet and I'm wanting to get the whole home dvr service.

Since we also have an antenna on the roof, I saw something about using the SWM to passthrough that signal and then using a diplexer to get the signal to the tv over one cable.

I know these are questions that will be answered Tuesday by the installer, I'm just looking for a heads-up and if there's anything I can do ahead of time to make his job a little easier. This all started as just swapping out the old receivers for some new ones but it sure seems to have gotten complex pretty quickly, or maybe I'm just overthinking the whole thing.

[Jimbo]

Right now we have an HR23 and 3 SD receivers installed in fall of 2009. As we're upgrading the tv in our bedroom to an HD model I called DirecTV directly and was told an HD receiver was free with $20 shipping or an HD-DVR for $99 plus shipping. After poking around under the "My Account" area, there was a link under the "My Equipment" area that said we were eligible for a free HD-DVR upgrade. After clicking on that and adding it to my cart it was showing as free with no S&H and simply nothing owed except the $6 lease fee.

So I went back and added in two more, I called DirecTV again to ask why I could get 3 free HD-DVR's from the website and although the man I spoke with was very nice he didn't really have an answer. I completed the checkout process while on the phone with him and the order went through. The installer is scheduled for Tuesday morning.

We have a SWM dish already, there's a four-way splitter in the attic that is not green label. What I'm interested in doing is sending back 2 of the SD receivers and keeping one. From what I've read so far, with 4 HD-DVR's and 1 SD that will put us at 9 tuners total and we'll need a different SWM or something? The HR23 we have now is connected by ethernet and I'm wanting to get the whole home dvr service.

Since we also have an antenna on the roof, I saw something about using the SWM to passthrough that signal and then using a diplexer to get the signal to the tv over one cable.

I know these are questions that will be answered Tuesday by the installer, I'm just looking for a heads-up and if there's anything I can do ahead of time to make his job a little easier. This all started as just swapping out the old receivers for some new ones but it sure seems to have gotten complex pretty quickly, or maybe I'm just overthinking the whole thing.

D* has added a lot of features in a short amount of time.
We went from the HD dish to the Slimline dish and then the SL dish WITH SWM, so YES there has been a lot of things changing ...

You would be better off if you were able to run a separate cable for the OTA all together, thus not having to try to piggyback signals on one line.

I don't know if an installer will do anything with diplexing or not, but you can ask.

[luisortega]

Just got off the phone with the installer, he won't be here until noon but he said he was out of HR24's and only had 23's. Guess we'll have a match set here.

Update: I just realized with all HR-23's if I decide to go with MRV I'm stuck buying 4 DECA adapters instead of just 1. My cost to get MRV working just nearly tripled. Sure wish they would just let me run everything over ethernet since the house is already wired.

[brad2388]

Just let them install the decas the free ones then just hard wire the rest. Use a router out of the free deca module so it will be on the same network as the others. Thats my exact setup now.

[luisortega]

We ended up getting an HR24, another 23, and an H25. Whole home is all setup and running great, and the 24 is noticeably faster scrolling through the guide and menus.