HD equipment upgrade

[bruceh]

I'm new here and have a basic question. I want to upgrade my equipment to HD.

Obviously I need a new HD receiver, but the other items for my installation I need help with.

I've attached pictures of the existing equipment. Can anyone give me some details for the items I'll need to replace these parts with.

 

[TheKrell]

I'll take a wag and guess those are circularly polarized LNBs and the two dishes are pointed at 110/119. These should actually work for HD (on those sats) just the same as they do for SD; the HD receiver does all the work (such as demodulating turbo 8PSK).

The biggest problem I see is that a lot of Dish HD programming is not on 110/119, and you will need another dish on either 61.5 or 129 W longitude. Aha, now I finally spotted the fact that you're in Alaska; no wonder you have such large dishes.

Ah... (Takes a quick gander at The List.) I see there are some channels on 148, but you can forget about 61.5. Looks like Dish is warming up some HD locals for Juneau, NP, and Fairbanks on 129. Think about another dish aimed at 129, and also a different switch to handle the 3rd sat location. An SW64 should work, although many of us have upgraded to DishPro (bandstacked) LNBs, which gives us a single cable per satellite location going to a switch such as the DPP33 (or DPP44), which can drive either 3 (or 4) dual-tuner receivers.