Well I joined the Hopper/joey crew today.
I installed my own Hopper and Joey unit . I am waiting for the second joey to arrive via ups some time next week. It got sent later for some reason by the loader. I have to say it was very easy to install and I'm on eastern arc. Here is what I had to do to get to the authorize screen on the hopper.
First of all I had a terk 44 clipped on to my 1000.4 eastern arc dish and it was run to three rooms in the house. I tried to use diplexors before the node to give me both sat and ota. It didn't work at all. I ended up taking two of my sat runs out of the antenna switch itself and run them straight to the node. Which meant using barrel connectors and re-cutting my coaxes to fit the lnb. I also had to switch my side sat dish to 119 sat instead of 110. I knew that if I didn't do this, I would never get a download of software . I learned that this was the way the 722k worked and the 922 did also. Without 119 it simply will NOT download the software using eastern arc sats.
I then had to take the third sat run and leave it in the antenna switch and use it to diplex for sat and ota to my living room, on the third coax run to my living room. I used and old 501 I had in the closet to power the ota antenna. It isn't authorized any longer , but it does power the antenna. From the outside , I diplexed it to run sat to the living room and used a coax run to my living room for ota and one to my master bedroom for ota. Thank God it all worked just like I set it up to do. I have ota in my living room for all my ota devices and am/fm radio on my a/v receiver. I also ran a coax to my computer room ,behind the living room tv, to give me ota in that room as well. I already split my living room tv , by hdmi splitter , to see the hopper in the computer room as well.
The hopper downloaded all the software in about 20 minutes and it was ready to be authorized by DISH. Very quick compared to what I read others have gone through. Called in the joey too ,while on the phone getting my hopper authorized. The joey took less than 5 minutes to download the software and was up and running in my master bedroom. I moved it to my boy's room after it was up and running and it worked there just fine too. I imagine the new joey coming next week will be just as easy to install. Looking forward to being able to watch on the joey in the master bedroom too. I even set it up to be controlled by my revue google box. I set it up as DISH Joey and it worked.
So I have ota in three rooms in my house : living room, computer room and master bedroom. My son couldn't care less about ota and even asked me what it was today.
Can't wait to get the usb ota tuner so I can do this through the hopper itself. I will have satellite in 4 rooms ,once the other joey gets here , and will only pay $14.00 a month for two joeys + the extra $4.00 whole house dvr fee. A slight $4.00 increase over what I had before with a 722k and two 211ks with dvr sofware. The hopper is a whole lot like the 922 I had two years ago in feel and menus , channel logos ,etc. , but it is a whole lot faster to use and so far, knock on wood , it seems pretty solid.
Now the only drawback in this whole thing is that when I called to authorize the receivers , I told the csr that I was replacing my purchased and owned 722k and two 211k receivers with a new owned and purchased hopper and joey. I repeated this and even told her that I always own my receivers etc. Guess what showed under equipment page on my DISH account? One owned joey and one Leased hopper. Of course ! Once again the csrs DO NOT LISTEN to their customers.
I ended up calling DISH and talking to the executive resolution department to get them to change it back to Owned. This was after going through a couple of csrs who could not believe I would pay over $700.00 to own a hopper. I informed them I paid only $318.00 to OWN a hopper and two joeys and a single node, After trade in value of $250.00 for my old receivers to dishdepot.com. I even quoted my receipt and when it was actually completed down to time ,date and order number. The executive resolution department came back after a wait and confirmed that I did indeed own the receivers. So I was promised within 24 hours it would reflect the owned status on my account. I took all the names down and id numbers and I still have my receipt from Dishdepot.com to show I bought them. I'm betting that by tomorrow evening I will be recalling DISH again to resolve this. This time I will go straight through cancellation to get it resolved and quit fooling with the front line csrs and techs.
