hd reception on boat

[sailor44]

we are running a raymarine satellite system on our boat and are unable to get more than one or two hd channels. We have been advised that it will not be possible to get more than these since our antenna cannot tract the sat that has most of the channels on it.

we are also told that if we switch to dish we can get them all, since they have all the hd channels on one sat.

Has anyone had this kind of issue, and is this advice accurate?? Thanks in advance!!

 

[Agonizing Fury]

I've never dealt with any of the self tracking dishes before, but my guess is that the problem doesn't lie with which satellites it can track, but with the fact that DirecTV uses Ka Band (Much Higher frequencies) satellites for the majority of it's HD programming. From what I can gather the raymarine devices are designed to receive Ku Band satellites. The equipment on the Raymarine device should be compatible with Dish Network (as they currently use only Ku band except for very rare circumstances) and should be able to get high definition programming (assuming it's got the software to track the dish network satellites) however it's entireley possible that it may be unable to track the satellites properly if it doesn't know how to decode and lock onto the Turbo Coded signal used by Dish on the majority of the transponders of Dish's High def satellites.

I would contact Raymarine to make sure about this, but they advertise that this little Gem (http://www.raymarine.com/ProductDetail.aspx?SITE=1&SECTION=2&PAGE=1642&PRODUCT=3952) can some of their non-HDTV antennas compatible with DirecTVs latest HD Channels. Not sure how a controller can make an LNB designed for Ku Band signals work with a Ka Band satellite, but if that's what they want to claim for $1200 then that better be what it does.

Either way, if you've paid thousands of dollars for a satellite antenna, they owe you answers, so I would send them an e-mail and ask specifics.

Best of luck

 

[jdspencer]

we are running a raymarine satellite system on our boat and are unable to get more than one or two hd channels. We have been advised that it will not be possible to get more than these since our antenna cannot tract the sat that has most of the channels on it.

we are also told that if we switch to dish we can get them all, since they have all the hd channels on one sat.

Has anyone had this kind of issue, and is this advice accurate?? Thanks in advance!!

Your current system is probably only receiving signals from the 101 satellite. You'll need to upgrade to a system that can also receive the sats at 99 and 103, to receive DirecTVs HD channels. And, receivers that can tune the Ka band.