Dish Playmaker

[skypilot]

Am looking at the Dish Playmaker for my Winnie. If you are using for trailer, would like to know if you are happy with the equipment and service. We take trailer to Arizona in winter, not happy with park cable, so looking at the Dish for TV. Thanks.

[creativepart]

We had an earlier version of the same product.

1. It works pretty good. It's noisy if mounted on the roof. You'll hear it working.

2. The dish is small, so it can't punch through heavy clouds or storms. But it's not too frequent a problem.

3. We had DISH for 20 years - at the house and on our RVs. Over that time it got very expensive. They nickle and dime you and raise each special little "option" you add every year. But if you start with a limited channel package it shouldn't be too bad. OUr last 5 years we were over $200 a month (home and RV combined). We dropped them for streaming online and are happy with the change but this too is not cut and dried easy.

4. If you mount it you have to park where there are not trees or other obstructions. If you don't mount it and buy a stand you can set it up to avoid the obstructions, but then you have to mess with it each time you setup.

[Morich]

We have Dish at home and added it as an additional Wally and use the Tailgator for the antenna. The equipment seems okay but the service from Dish as well as the sales are terrible.
Sales issues first is that we were led to believe lots of things which were not true, exactly. You cannot just take off and get the same service in the RV as at home UNLESS, and that unless just blows that feature for us as we do not normally expect to have full time internet service in an RV! IF you add a hard drive, have reliable full time internet and such options more things they mention may work but not for us. Things that rely on internet like voice remote is out, so check carefully how each item works with the others and ask lots of questions if the options are important to you. DVR recording when not there was the one which bit us the most as it is one item we do use at home.
For the antenna, we have no problems with it as we often do find it possible to be under the shade but still set the Tailgator out to get a South view but sometimes not. We just have a couple 25 foot coax and a coax connection in the wet bay and find that no big deal. But the bigger deal is the way the deal with updates for the computer end of things as they do not figure it in for folks who do not have it set up full time.
That has been a constant problem when we only go out occasionally as they take us out of the system when not used and getting back in is a major, major pain as they only do it one way and that is their way even if we tell them what is needed. First we have to unplug and retry and jump through all the hoops to prove that the wiring is connected correctly and after four or more hours of gradually being bumped to the next level somebody may finally agree that we did not get the last update! Three levels before getting an English as first language person! The problem being that you have to have the dish pointed correctly before doing the download but you can't do the download because your program is not up to date!!!!
The equipment might be okay but it is not run with very much thought as to what RV folks do. When we once started a download and then found we lost service due to tree limbs blowing around, we had to replace the Wally as it was not able to connect with only half the download done! They first wanted to charge but it was only six months old so they did finally agree to not charge. One I might guess at four hours average time to do that! option is to go out, set the diah up and then they have an app for restoring the service they cut off but that always depends on getting the updates squared away first.
While out, you can call and get them to switch you to the local stations which is nice. What they did not tell us was that it cuts off the local stations that you were recording at home!
Not happy and would change but I see no worthwhile alternate.