Rant: Stupid UHF remotes for Dish!

[sixt7gt350]

Usually I do a lot more online research before I make such a decision, but the bundle savings of $40/month got me excited.

I jumped from cable to Dish, thinking I could control one 322 receiver with 2 Replay units. BUZZZ!!!! The 2nd tuner in the receiver is UHF-controlled only. I could get each Replay its own receiver, but each additional receiver is $5/month, which eats into the bundle savings and I STILL have to supply my own locals. (Stupid SHVIA) If I used Replay for the primary tuner of the 222 receiver, I'd lose the HD on my HDTV and I'd also have to use the UHF remote. (Which would mean no JP1 or Harmony enabled remote consolidation.)

I know a lot of people like the idea of UHF remotes, but response is very sluggish via UHF and it's not Replay-friendly!!!

Why, oh why, didn't they set up the receivers to have the 2nd tuner be IR or UHF, depending?

<sigh>

[Killer2600]

Why, oh why, didn't they set up the receivers to have the 2nd tuner be IR or UHF, depending?

Because IR doesn't work through walls and in most cases the 2nd tuner will be running a TV in a separate distance room in the house.

Dishnet's solution for a person like you is a HD DVR

[Tommy Tyler]

It's even worse. I had about six UHF Dish remotes for my old 710 dual tuner receiver, and when Dish made me upgrade to a newer 522, NONE of them were usable. You have to have a "Pro" model Dish remote. I disected one to see if there was a simple work-around, but they've completely redesigned the UHF transmitter, so without a lot of work there's no way to tell what all changed. I did find an on-line source for more "Pro" remotes at a pretty reasonable price, seems like it was about $6 or $9. My impression is that the range and responsiveness of the "Pro" model is better than that of the older model.

[unclemiltie]

yea, they're stupid.


The older receivers (721, 3000, etc) used to work with BOTH IR and UHF so you could use an IR repeater and get the benefits of a JP1 remote. They also made me get rid of my trusty 721 and replaced it with a 522. GRRRR....


Now, the newer dual tuner receivers have the UHF remote only. (as far as I can tell, I did try nearly every combination of the Dish network protocol and device/subdev once when I firtst got my 622, but right now I'm stuck with the UHF for the 2nd TV. (sigh)


Tommy, you were trying to find a way to look at the signal from the UHF to see if it really was using a signal similar to the Dish protocol in IR. Did you ever do that? I wonder if there is a way to re-populate the IR pieces into the receivers like there was with the 4000 way back when?

[sixt7gt350]

Why, oh why, didn't they set up the receivers to have the 2nd tuner be IR or UHF, depending?

Because IR doesn't work through walls and in most cases the 2nd tuner will be running a TV in a separate distance room in the house.

Dishnet's solution for a person like you is a HD DVR

I was willing to relegate my Replay units to OTA HD only, but when they set up my account, I wasn't eligible for the DVR package since I wasn't eligible for local channels. (It made no sense to me, but it was what I was told.)

55 hours of two-tuner HD sounded pretty good to me, too!