Direct TV and the King Dome

I am retired and today I thought I would take advantage of that fact.  So I left the scooter in the shed all day.  I was on track to not start the car either, but that was spoiled in the late afternoon.

My younger son, Ben handed me a Direct TV receiver that he had taken from service at his house yesterday when I was over there with the scooter.  It is an HD model, and looked every bit of brand new.

The important part was that it had the red, blue, and green outputs of the component signal on the back that is the matching input of the Allegro TV system in the coach.

It also has the HDMI outputs, but our 2008 is set up for component.  That means the receiver matches the technology I needed.

This morning I began by finding all kinds of wires, and attaching the receiver to our dish on the Southwest side of the house.  For starters, I just hooked the old yellow video wire to the front of an ooold TV in the basement.  It came on, and booted but gave me no signal reports.

I messed and messed with it but could not get it to respond to the remote.  After the longest time, I decided that the batteries in the remote must be down.  That's when I discovered that there were no batteries in the remote!  Duh!

Once I had it responding to me, I called the Direct TV folks.  They wanted to ship me a brand new receiver, with the correct HDMI outputs.  And call back next week when you get it.  You can't use the old one since it isn't yours.  Its registered to a Mr. Ivers.  Ya, my son, I'm Mr. Ivers too.  After some arguing and discussion of parentage, he decided he could activate this older receiver.

I told him I was installing it in the basement, since he needed to know what room it was going in.  I guess they record that in their computer, so they know which receiver the lady of the house is calling about.

So after receiving its codes from the satellite, it began to work.  Not on HD of course, because the dish isn't looking at the HD satellite.  So I decided to move to the motorhome, and see if I could make it work over there.

That's when I drove the car. I then installed it into the overhead locker on the passenger side of the front TV.  I fired up the King Dome and it found the bird fairly quickly.  But I was having  problems when I would land on a HD channel, as the King Dome would begin searching in vain for the other bird.

But the component wiring in the coach worked to drive all three TVs and by switching off the search mode of the dome, I played quite nicely.  All of this was driven by the Onan genset.

I don't know if it is possible to have the dome switch to the HD satelite as you surf the channels, or how to even make the dome follow channels when you are driving, for that matter.  Yes I have read the book, but it is clear as mud.

At least I am now ready to see if the dealer can assist me in making some of this work.  Assuming that I ever get a call back from the dealer.  Not a peep yet!

Retired Rod