[jci-joe]

Well I have decided to leave Comcast and come back to Dish. Comcast was raising rates much quicker than Dish and I wanted to leverage the free OTA HD signals.

I just purchased a 942 receiver on Ebay and will deactivate my 811 that I am using for Sky angel only.

My question is, will they, or how can I avoid a reconnect fee or upgrade fee? In reality since I have Skyangel, I guess I never left dish. I had the top 120 package about 3 years ago.

Since I will not be buying any new hardware from Dish, are there any promos out there for folks like me coming back?

I will be adding the Top 60 package along the the DVR for about $36 per month. I will have to see how my analog locals look on my non-hd tv's before I subscribe to Dish locals.

 

[boba]

Why did you buy the 942 the only HD you can get is OTA dish won't authorize it for any HDTV programming.

 

[CABill]

There is no UPgrade fee and I wouldn't expect any charge involved to add the 942 and then drop the 811. Dropping a receiver isn't considered a DOWNgrade as far as the $5 fee - that is only programming changes.

There is a reconnect fee of $25, but you shouldn't have any trouble getting that waived. The SA sub may mean you "never left", but it sounds like you once subscribed to AT120, went to cable, and are now coming back which could trigger a "reconnect fee". The Promos are only for lease deals, but you can consider the waive of the reconnect to be a "promo"??

DISH locals will be an issue though. The 811 is treated as a special case and gets Guide info for OTA digital channels without a subscription to satellite locals. That isn't true of the 942 (or 622). You only see "Digital Service" for OTA channels in the Guide until you subscribe to DISH locals. Additionally, the NTSC tuner for OTA Analog channels and the ATSC tuner for OTA Digital channels are only available on TV1. You can record the OTA digitals and start watching that recording on TV2, but I don't think you'll like that to:

I will have to see how my analog locals look on my non-hd tv's before I subscribe to Dish locals.

If that just means you connect the OTA antenna directly to the remote TVs and aren't expecting to watch the analog locals using the 942's analog tuner, you should be able to try that right now without waiting for the 942 to arrive.

You really need the sat locals to use the name based recording features of the OTA digital channels - sorry.

 

[jci-joe]

Why did you buy the 942 the only HD you can get is OTA dish won't authorize it for any HDTV programming.

My father has the 622 with the silver package. While there are some "neat" channels, they are not worth the $20 per month. My personal opinion is that "TV" should not cost more than $40 per month. The 622's were alot more to buy and if you don't subscribe to the HD package, they wack you for $6 HD enable fee. Since I get 6 OTA HD channels, thats enough for me.

I looked at buying a used 508 or 721 but the 942 gave me what I wanted (HD recording OTA, 2 TV's for price of 1 and I own the unit).

I may eventually sell the 811, but I want to see if I can use it as a local only receiver if I keep it hooked up to the satellite.

Why does Dish treat the 811 different than the 942 when it comes to the program guide? Odd.

Is there a way to combine the TV 2 signal with the OTA antenna to receive the locals (analog) on their own channel with the dish signal at about channel 72?

 

[Mike D-CO5]

The 811 and the 942 are discontinued models and they used different software for their times. The 811 is like the 6000 also discontinued , with the free access to ota station guide imformation. The 622 is the newest model and you have to subscribe to locals from DIsh to get the ota guide information and the channels as well, or you get hit with a $6.00 hd enabeling fee if you don't sub to either locals or hd pack.

 

[CABill]

They allowed the 811 to get the Guide info w/o a subscription to locals and my GUESS was that generated subscribers that didn't get locals - losing $5 of revenue. They decided to require a local sub for the EPG info on receivers after that. 921 once had a firmware version that did it w/o a local sub, but they "corrected" that. 942 has always needed locals. There are posts here about some 211s getting digital OTA guide info w/o a local sub, but not a lot of people fall into that category.

You can combine an OTA antenna and the 622's Home Distribution coax with a regular splitter turned backwards into a combiner. Home Dist is a better name than "TV2 coax" since you can choose to put TV1 on it as well, but it goes to Output 1 of the splitter, the OTA antenna goes to Output 2, and Input goes to the remote bedroom (or to a 4 way splitter to take it lots of places?). The lower the channel number you select for Home Dist, the less loss you get. As long as there aren't OTA channels in use in the lower 20-30 range, you may get a better picture there than if you use the high 60s.