What DirecTV Dish to Get?

A fellow self installer from that era here... I'm in the same boat. Should I ever want to upgrade my DTV equipment to support HD (maybe when DTV roles it into the fees and I don't have to pay $10 extra for HD plus equipment...) I'll have to make sure I can carry forward my "old" gear and make it play nice with the "new" stuff.

Good Luck,

I recently had the dish upgrade done you are discussing. I also installed my own 18" round dish, years ago. When the installer got here, I gave him coffee and showed him where everything was. I had already set up a ladder next to the dish, and cleared out everything to give him access. It looked to me like he had multiple kinds of dishes in the truck and also multiple types of DVRs. Directv had sort-of assigned equipment to houses, but the order sheets were sort-of vague. In general, they give the best stuff to new customers. However, because I had given him coffee and set stuff up before he got here, he gave me the newer stuff intended for the next customer. I believe the stuff I have is what you want. He installed a 5 satellite slimline KAKU dish with SWM LNBs and SWM Multiswitch. He also upgraded my receivers from the HR22 ones DTV had for me to be HR23 receivers (bigger disks) My DTV order just said HD dish and 3 HD DVRs. The advantage to the SWM stuff is that you only need one wire to drive 2 tuners (done via magic) I had 2 wires already run to each location, but I expected he would need to add more wires from the dish to the multiswitch. Instead, one of my 2 old wires is no longer needed. I watched the guy do the install (DTV offered to do it free with the HD upgrade) and I think I would have a really hard time doing it myself without a real meter, and I do almost everything myself. The dish was easier to adjust, because it had adjustment screws, rather than my old one which you would loosen and try to move a little, but his meter would give him signal strength for all 5 satellites off of the single lead. I got rid of all my old receivers, but the documentation for the SWM-8 multiswitch implied to me that it had 3 "legacy" ports for dealing with non-swm-compliant receivers. My guess is that you could hook an old multiswitch off 2 of the ports and you could hook up what ever old stuff you still had, but I never tested that.