Geek Zing

I came home early from work today because the installer for DirectTV didn’t sound like he had a firm grasp on what he was talking about.  I came to the sudden realization that it wasn’t DirecTV that was misleading me, but rather the installer who had very little knowledge of how this equipment works.

When I came home, I found the house was pretty much set up to spec except for the kids bedrooms.  They were supposed to share a single receiver in Emily’s room.  The tech actually installed the receiver in Tyler’s room even though the incoming feed from the dish entered into Emily’s room!  This means that he went through the trouble of extending that cable through the house into Tyler’s room and hooking absolutely nothing up in Emily’s room.

My first task was to unplug the receiver from Tyler’s room and plug it in next to Emily’s TV.  I took apart the two COAX cables that were joined with a male-to-male connector installed by the tech and plugged the feed from the dish into the receiver.  I connect the other end of the COAX that led into Tyler’s room into the TV-OUT portion of the receiver.

I hooked Emily’s TV up to the receiver using the component outputs.  This allowed both TV’s to view the output of the receiver at the same time.  I really don’t understand why the tech was telling me that it was not possible and later that he could make it possible for an extra charge!  It would have actually been LESS work to do it the way that we had agreed upon.

So, anyways, that drama is over and I can move on to more fun things.  The more that I play with these new receivers, the happier I am that I switched to Direct TV.  These are WAY better than Dish Network DVR’s!

I really can’t wait to play with the iPhone app that is currently in beta.

Here are the receivers that I have: