Is this something new?

Yes its new that's why you haven't seen it in 25 years.

 

Yeah ...

There's a thread on the satelliteguys forum on this new feature.

If rain-fade becomes too severe on a Ka band HD channel, it pops up an option to rapidly switch you over to its SD duplicate (if one exist) in the lower frequency KU band. Which is naturally more immune to rain fade.

A good idea, but puzzling why DIRECTV would implement this feature now so late in the game like this. What-with the SD transition and its elimination of the wasteful SD duplicates to take place so near.

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New features made through FW updates are still possible. But much less likely for the older boxes as you point out. ...

It's the area of satellite hardware or equipment is really where it's virtually certain there won't be anything new.

At least not a long as AT&T are the owners ....

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DirecTV is pretty bleeding edge when it comes to tech & software. I heard a rumor they are adding support for getting TV via smoke signals and telegraph next .

 

At this point in the lifecycle of the HR2x, HR34 and HR44 series DVRs, it seems more likely that an old feature will be lost rather than a new feature added.

 

Yes new feature

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All my HR24’s updated early last week with that feature, and worked well with the monsoon of rain/hail we had yesterday for about 35 minutes, which resulted in nearly 1.30” of rain in that timeframe. It triggered the SD duplicate off the 101 bird for the show we were watching.

 

Quad PIP?

 

E-sata / usb disks act as 2th dish and they are account tied not box tied like disk?

 

Like I said over on the other forum, I can't for the life of me understand why Directv would add this functionality now when MPEG2 SD will be shut down next year. Heck, it would have been shut down at the end of last year if they hadn't had to push back the schedule for contractual reasons.

Makes me wonder how long this has been on their programmers 'to do' list and whether those programmers have any idea that the SD channels this feature depends on will be going away soon. This would have been a nice feature in 2010, but it is about a decade late.

 

This suggests that either AT&T thinks that weather is going to be a much bigger issue in the next year or that they're not getting much closer to their goal of moving HD to Ku.

I suppose that there's a third scenario where they acknowledge they don't have enough Ku space for even the most important HD content so the SD will remain as a fallback. Ka (including RB) may not be particularly efficient, but they have a whole lot more of it.

 

I'd like to see the undelete thing on our DVRs. Why is Dish so far ahead of D* in DVR technology?

Rich

 

I saw a lot of rain fade during last night's Yankees game and nothing happened. I was using my 44 to watch the game that was recorded on a 24-500. I did not see a switch to SD.

Rich