CuRVWander

TV signals continued.... Looks like a fixed-mount, open-faced dish is going to be the choice for us.  Winegard makes an antenna that will automatically raise itself and locate the satellites.  It has an LNB setup that will see three satellites simultaneously. With this dish, DirecTV has a receiver/DVR that can record 5 shows at a time, deliver a feed to a second TV, PIP and split screen two shows or a show on one half and a computer display on the other half.  Cool!  And all in high definition.  DirecTV calls this receiver the "Genie", it is going to be pretty slick if it works as good as it sounds. I have been getting set up with the folks at New Horizons (manufacturer of my rig) for a summer visit to do some warranty work.  I talked to the service manager about doing this antenna upgrade too.  He not only said: "no problem" but offered to get me a better price on the antenna than anything I could do.  He sent me an email later, and sure...

Growing up in the Texas Panhandle your perception of what is old and historic are skewed rather uniquely.  Oh sure, as kids you read the history books and did your daily lessons about Columbus, the Magna Carta, and the guys that dreamed the dream and forged the ideas of having a country where self-reliance was your ticket to prosperity.  But all that was a bit disconnected for someone that never ventured farther than Oklahoma to visit family during summer vacation.  In my little West Texas town the first permanent structure, a brick house, was not built until around 1930.  That was the standard for 'old' for as far as you could see in any direction on the compass.  Keep in mind that is pretty far, for in these parts of the high plains you had to do little more than stand on the second strand of a barbed-wire fence and see the curve of the earth.  Ancient history that was real to us, something we could see and touch, was limited to some ruins of dwellings bu...

Its time to get serious about how to receive television signals.  After more than six months of getting our television entertainment the old fashioned way via a cable connection to Comcast, we know that there is no way to continue with this setup once we start moving around the country. There are many ways to get TV reception but most of them are pretty limited, some like the old days,  only getting three channels at best.  To get a full choice of "cable" channels you have to go with a satellite dish and get service from either DirectTV or Dish Network.  The Dish guys do make an extra effort in that they have an RV division.  They tailor the service to mobile users by having a separate customer service, no contracts and the ability to turn the service off and on in a month-by-month fashion repeatedly.  The con is that there are no national network stations, so no "local" programming such as news and weather or the prime time shows on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox...