I'm at hour 48 on my newly installed HR20-700. I did the complete install myself, including mounting and aligning the dish. Outside of things I didn't expect to work, such as OTA reception (didn't even bother to hook the antenna up) and caller ID, the only issue I've had is the pink FF icon. It has recorded everthing I've asked it to (national and local) and played back everything it recorded without issue. It hasn't recorded anything I didn't want and didn't delete any recordings I wanted to keep. I am fortunate to have 4 local HD channels in my downfeed so I'm not even sure I'll even bother to hook the OTA antenna up to the HR20. While I was checking the sat signal strength on the receiver it started downloading the e3 software all on it's own before I could even get the receiver activated.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with it so far (knock on wood). Expecting the worst has prepared me for possible (maybe probable) issues in the short term. I am a D* Tivo user. My other DVR is an older RCA DVR40 that has been relegated to backup recording. Personal adjustment to this somewhat differently configured DVR took a few hours. But it's all there pretty much, just different. I was never a double buffer power user so missing the double buffer didn't hurt my feelings too much.
My belief is that, for some, this unit may not be ready for prime time. It's hard to wade between the BS and the hype around here. While I have no doubt that some people have serious hardware issues, I'm equally certain that there's a silent majority that have no issues of any consequence.
I have an observation that I'd like to share about dish alignment. The "official" d* alignment instructions (both written and video) go into great detail about the need to tune the dish for optimum alignment because of the narrow beamwidth of the ka birds. But the instructions never have you tune to any of the ka birds, depending on aligning to just 2 of the ku birds. They only ask the installer to verify good signal strength on all the birds. I found that after going through the "official" D* alignment procedure that the 99* ka signal on my birdog was a lil lacking. It was there, but just a half turn on the az fine tune adjustment screw brough it in a whole lot better while still giving me excellent readings on the 101 and 119 birds. My receiver shows excellent reception on all the xponders it sees with an average of 97 or 98, the lowest is 87 (xponder 4 on the 99* bird and the only reading in the 80s) with many at 100.
Far be it for me to cast aspirsions on the characters of some D* installers, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that some of the issues that some people are experiencing with the local HD downfeed are dish alignment issues.
For the record, I don't work for D* or any other consumer satellite content provider. Nor am I contract employee for D* or anyone else for that matter. Furthermore, I have never worked for such companies. Let's just say that it's a rare D* installer that has as much experience aligning satellite dishes as I have.
