Receiver dying? What should I upgrade to?

I would recommend a Hopper Duo. That way, your monthly DVR fee would only be $10, instead of the $15 for any other model of Hopper. The Hopper Duo would still give you two tuners, plus the ability to use one of those tuners for recording the four major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox) simultaneously, since you subscribe to locals. (Hopper Duo does not do the automatic prime time recording like other Hoppers, but you can set your own separate timers for shows on the four major networks. Hopper Duo also lacks AutoHop, if that is important to you.)

For your second TV, you have a couple of options. The first option would obviously be to add a Joey. (In case you were wondering, Hopper Duo does not support Super Joey, so there is no way to add tuners that way.) The other option, which I would recommend, would be to add a Wally. The monthly fee for a Wally would be the same $7 that a Joey would cost. The advantage of a Wally (after you add an external hard drive and pay a one-time $40 activation fee) is that it would add two additional tuners for DVR recording. (You could instead choose to simply use the Wally as a non-DVR receiver, and pay no additional upfront fees. This would still give you an additional tuner for watching live TV while all tuners on the Hopper Duo are busy recording.) The disadvantage of the Wally would be that it does not integrate with the Hopper (any model Hopper) in any way.

If you would be interested in purchasing these receivers (to avoid any possible two-year commitment if you do the upgrade through Dish) then check out the Classifieds section on the SatelliteGuys forum. Someone there has both a Hopper Duo and a Wally for sale, cheap.

 

Two Wallys. Even better, two 211Ks. $7/mo for the second receiver. One-time $40 DVR fee, if you plug in hard drives.

If one should start having problems (like your 722K), at least you're not without TV in the whole house.

 

I thought of that. The only reason I didn't mention it was in case KevinRS has any recordings from the ViP722 archived on an external hard drive, since those would not be able to be played on either a Wally or ViP211. They would be able to be played from (or transferred to) the Hopper Duo. I would definitely recommend the two-Wally solution over the two-ViP211 solution, since the Wally has twice the number of tuners that a ViP211 has, for the same monthly price. The advantage of a ViP211 is the built-in OTA, but KevinRS did not mention using OTA.

By the way, if KevinRS is interested in the purchase option I mentioned before, the seller does have two Wally receivers available.