New to FTA

[crazy8]

Hello everyone. This is my first post on this forum and I had a few questions. My wife and I bought our first home last year and have been using an antenna I installed in our attic for TV this whole time. Well that works well but I have stumbled across this FTA forum and thought I would check it out. Our house came with a dish already installed. I have been wondering, "is there anything I can do with that?" and that's how I came across this. I am very much interested in getting what I need so that I could put that dish back to work but only doing FTA channels. Now I know I need an FTA receiver, dish of course is already installed and cable already ran, man I got it easy. So here are my questions.

1) The dish I have I believe is Direct TV (I would have to double check if that's of any importance). I think its only got 1 LNB so if I wanted to watch HD FTA channels would I still be able to or would I need to have one of the 3 LNB Direct TV dishes (HD Models) to do that?

2) As for the FTA receiver itself, are there good ones (brand wise) that the FTA community tends to prefer more than other brands? The flipe side of this question is are their any receivers that I should stay far away from when picking one out?

3) This may be a stupid question but do a lot of people use FTA DVR's? Im thinking I may do the DVR thing since I have not yet built my media server and on occasion there are some things that my wife and I miss due to schedules and I know we both would like the ability to record for later viewing.

Thank you very much for the help in advance and keep up the great work on this forum.

[setwire]

Hello everyone. This is my first post on this forum and I had a few questions. My wife and I bought our first home last year and have been using an antenna I installed in our attic for TV this whole time. Well that works well but I have stumbled across this FTA forum and thought I would check it out. Our house came with a dish already installed. I have been wondering, "is there anything I can do with that?" and that's how I came across this. I am very much interested in getting what I need so that I could put that dish back to work but only doing FTA channels. Now I know I need an FTA receiver, dish of course is already installed and cable already ran, man I got it easy. So here are my questions.

1) The dish I have I believe is Direct TV (I would have to double check if that's of any importance). I think its only got 1 LNB so if I wanted to watch HD FTA channels would I still be able to or would I need to have one of the 3 LNB Direct TV dishes (HD Models) to do that?

2) As for the FTA receiver itself, are there good ones (brand wise) that the FTA community tends to prefer more than other brands? The flipe side of this question is are their any receivers that I should stay far away from when picking one out?

3) This may be a stupid question but do a lot of people use FTA DVR's? Im thinking I may do the DVR thing since I have not yet built my media server and on occasion there are some things that my wife and I miss due to schedules and I know we both would like the ability to record for later viewing.

Thank you very much for the help in advance and keep up the great work on this forum.

1 Your Dish is too small and has the wrong LNB for True FTA Sats.

2 Any decent FTA receiver will work for True FTA ----A good used Pansat 3500 would be a good one to use.

3 A decent Hard Drive would be the thing to use for recording.

[crazy8]

So I am assuming I will need to either stick with my antenna or find a 30"+ dish then to do True FTA?

[trackhoe2]

hello and welcome the first thing you need to do is read,read and reade some more until you understand this hobby and you and any one else will enjoy it.good luck

[setwire]

So I am assuming I will need to either stick with my antenna or find a 30"+ dish then to do True FTA?

33 inch is minimum size for True FTA Sats.

---------- Post added at 10:44 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:44 PM ----------

hello and welcome the first thing you need to do is read,read and reade some more until you understand this hobby and you and any one else will enjoy it.good luck

Nice 1st post.