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Section 1: Getting Ready

The satellite community has been very excited since DISH officially announced their new Hopper and Joey platform at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. When word that the new platform would be made available in the first quarter of 2012 few believed DISH would have made it, but it is now March 15th and the Hopper and Joey are here!

Based on the new XiP platform by EchoStar the Hopper and Joey are DISH Networks first receivers to support MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) technology. MoCA is important as it allows DISH to distribute video signals from its base station (which DISH has called the Hopper) to its client receivers (which DISH has called the Joey.)

Up until now each room that was to have satellite would need to be wired from the dish or switch to each location in the house that was to get television using RG 6 cable, however using this MoCA technology in a single Hopper setup means only one cable needs to be run from the outside to your Hopper. Installers can then reuse the existing cable wiring found in most houses to distribute the signal to the Joeys. Under the MoCA specs you can even use RG-59 cable to the Joey's! By being able to reuse the cable, which is already pre-wired in most homes. will be both a major time and cost savings for DISH going forward.

In preparation for the install I cleaned up all the wiring in my house. I've been a long time DISH customer who has had every new technology DISH has offered over the years. With that said, my existing wiring setup had two cables going to every room because mydual tuner receivers needed two cables coming in from the dish or switch. I easily took out a few hundred feet of unused cable that was running through my house. My wife was happy to see a majority of the coax outside that was running along the sides of the house gone. She was already happy with the new Hopper system about to be installed.

At my house the satellite dish is on the right side of the house. However all of my "home runs" to my TV's are on the left side of the house. To make things easier I purchased a COAX tester from Amazon.com. This allowed me to test and label each coax run so I knew exactly where each line was going. Now I had to wait for the Hopper to arrive before I could do any more work. But I could imagine how the rest of the wiring was going to go, which could be completed by just removing the old DPP44 switches and hooking each cable to a high quality two way cable splitter. I could not wait to get the new equipment in my hands!

A few days went by and then finally UPS delivered me my new Hopper and Joey's! It was already dark outside so I would have to wait for the next day to get started. (As a past beta tester of EchoStar products, it should be noted that I was provided the Hopper and Joeys for this review.)

The next morning I woke up, put on my SatelliteGuys shirt andDISH Network hat, then went outside to get to work. If felt great to be able to go outside and rip apart the mess and remove the old switches from the wall. Within minutes I was hooking the "home runs" to each room to a good quality 2 way splitter. I then did some quick cleanup of the wiring and was very happy with my efforts. Less than 15 minutes outside and I was now ready to go inside and install the Hopper.