I had Dish from September 99 until I dumped them in April this year. The DirecTV guy was here with a dual feed and two receivers the next day. My beef with Dish was when I found out that I had been paying for programming on Satellite 110, when my older parabolic dish was pointing at just the 119 degree satellite. I couldn't get a straight answer to how long they were charging for what I wasn't getting, so I dumped them. They had replaced a defective receiver so I was obligated to them for over a year after I told them. Wouldn't you know the idiots called the day after I dumped them. I told the AHs to go back over a year to the notes that I demanded be placed on my account and to never call back. I also have a collection of non-responsive Emails proving that their combined IQs are unlikely to eclipse 100.
Since I only started with DirecTV on April 18th, I can't tell you what their customer service is like. I note that TWC provides "Local on the 8's", like cable, based on Rx zip code. Dish didn't work that way. The monthly cost over 2 years is substantially less that Dish, due to a cheap 1st year promotion. Normal monthly rates for my equivalent service seem to be a tad more than Dish.
I don't mind that I lose my picture, due to signal attenuation, when dense clouds approach from the southwest. That just gives me a two or more minute warning to get the apartment windows closed before the heavy rains start. It happened last night during "Top Shot" on The History Channel, at a time when red blobs were showing on the weather radar. It is unlikely that you will get any snow or ice accumulation because of the lower look angles involved. We used to have to worry about wet, slushy snow on the 6 meter dish, at our TV station in Cleveland. It would collect snow like a bowl if we were looking at Spacenet 1. It was straight south and at the top of the polar arc. Satcom F1R was our normal bird, as far west and low on the arc as we could go. It was easy to use a push broom to remove the snow on the lower half of the dish. The Dish and Direct antennas and LNB mounts are designed so that the reflector is more vertical.
Joe
