Randy1 you can benefit from reading everything on this fta forum-you need to do a lot of reading to understand the terms, the equipment used, whats reported to be working well and what isn't.(Most of us are not afraid to relate what we think is junk and what isn't, haha)
Viewsat receivers are only average for blindscanning, I've got one but not the PVR model. Some of them , I have read in places, do not work at all for the PVR function--the hardware may be there but the firmware provided doesn't make it work. Click on the sponsors above, Sadoun and SatelliteAV, GoSatellite, they all have lots of equipment for sale, or entire systems. Post back here when you find something interesting and somebody will have an opinion on it. I like Radar's idea myself, a standalone solution.
On your sports feeds, I find at least half of them lately are High def signals, these ordinary fta boxes will only give you audio on those. Their are a few HD-FTA boxes out there but few that are reliable. The Coolsats, 8000, 8100 seem to be highly favored for HD but they don't have blind-scan. So users here will have a regular SD blindscan box to find the feeds, and enter them into their HD box. You can also find computer-card fta receivers that will do HD signals, and those nasty 4.2.2 video signals, which is one of those weird signals I mentioned.