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Several weeks ago, I ordered a Voom package. My experiences (mostly negative) with the order process can be viewed at this thread.

***Note***
If you just wanna see my performance and not my install experience, skip to the last two paragraphs.


I had previously been notified by Don Lor's that the installing tech would give me a call early today, and this did occur. Right after 8AM he calls and states he'd like to move my install to the morning and suggested 11AM. I agreed with the time and was home at 10:55AM waiting for his arrive. Waited for a good while 'til right around 11:25AM, I was curious as to whether he would still come so I called their main offices for a status. I waited for about 8 minutes through numerous repeats of their holding menus only to finally give up. I called again 5 mins later and got thru. She put me on hold and paged the installer to my number then returned to the phone and said he'd call me immediately. Well, I saw him drive by immediately then call me back 5 minutes later saying "What's your house number?". I'm not sure why it took 5 minutes to call me after he passed my house as I live on a dead end street with only about 18 houses, but anyway, he finally got there and the process began.

I won't bore anyone with too many details, but I requested no diplexer and was denied, I requested a ground mounting (like my immediate neighbor has) and was asked to reschedule. I allowed him to mount it on the roof and I liked the obscurety of the placement. On the back end of the roof and not visible from the street. He installed a powered system because I was pretty far from the tower I suppose. Overall, he was a pretty good guy so I'll cut him some slack on the little things I didn't like.

The overall organization of this process was pretty bad. Almost no documentation, contradictory statements in the install acknowledgement paperwork, relative inflexibility from the installer, and a somewhat dissapointing experience.

We installed onto my Sony 42" plasma TV using the DVI interface (I kept all other cables and such for future testing). Turned the receiver on and a few moments later, I was pretty much in awe of the quality of the HDNews picture. I have not yet connected the STB to my audio receiver so I won't yet comment on the digital audio. It worked enough to where I was comfortable that I could at least play with it when I had time, but I was about 2 hours behind schedule by this point and I didn't want to test it too thoroughly at that time. I did notice that my Off-Air Signal Quality mostly stayed in the low teens and my Off-Air Signal Power stayed consistently at 62. Some channels, especially local, have real difficulty being recognized. I asked about this, and the installer insisted that it was ok and just fluctuates often. I just accepted it as it was, because I didn't have time to explore it further.

I came back later in the day and had the local Fox2 station on while I was stripping some carpet up in the next room. Display was clear as I walked back and fourth and the sound was consistent. I stopped and checked the OASQ and noticed it was constant at 60. Great improvement to me so I felt as though maybe things would go smoothly from there. Not exactly. I dragged some carpet out to the garage and as I entered the house and walked through the living room, I hit my remote garage door button to close the garage door, immediately the channel went dead. I'm like "WTH?" and I hit the garage button again and sure enough, back comes Fox2. So I go in the menu and monitor the status. After about 5 minutes of tested it's become obvious to me that I pretty much need to leave my garage door open if I want to watch Fox2 or NBC anytime soon. ABC seems to do a little better (great since I got this darn thing to watch the Pistons in HD on ABC). Now I'm not quite sure how I wish to approach this. This is pretty strange, anyone have a comment or suggestion? Anyway, that's about all for now. I'll comment more later as I play with this thing.