Needed Good Solid UTV

Help. Tuner started flaking on last of my dual tuner units. Edict issued from the family, get a new one or ditch UTV. I know new ones are non-existent, but I'll pay a fair and decent price for one last go around to keep all the equipment unified RCA.

Thanks in advance,
Ed
PM or email to: andrews < at > hughes net

I want to thank Mark M. for selling me two RCA units. I managed to cycle one into the living room with little disruption this weekend.

I also want to thank everyone who has contacted me about possible sales.

Sincerely thanks to all the support this forum provides.

Ed

Funny you mention that, because even after a "going once, going twice" warning before the UTV swap my wife sat down to the new unit and asked where the last episode of PanAm was?

My son has pretty filled over half the old 80Gb with SpongeBob episodes. He might be getting it hooked up in his room with it over Christmas? We do have a standalone DVD recorder which is (was) hooked up to the UTV via a S-Video splitter. He archived a bunch of the Penguins of Madagascar on DVD-R and claimed no need for the other material.

Apart from that, I'm a pretty physical media guy. DVDs and Laserdiscs with no real back log of movies on the UTV to speak of. While we are on the topic, I also picked up a RCA LDR-600 autoreverse player. A-B flips take a little while but are still faster than manually. Only bummer is that unit's remote doesn't have the shuttle jog control that my LDR-500 does.

I was thinking the WD-Media Hub might also be an archive option? I was going to pick one up, but I can't get a decent internet connect where we live to use any streaming media sources. It would be nice to find a good capture device that could sit side by side to the UTV; not sure if the WD would be it since it has composite and component but no S-Video. Something hanging off a home network (wired or wireless) would seem to be ideal where you could drop and drag back to a local PC for archiving?

Let me have the holidays settle down (and associated expenses) and I'll probably take you up on it. We just put up a 35' TV tower to hang a Yagi antenna off for cellular modem service. The tower was donated, but I got to spend two weekends on painting and prep (Rustoleum Oil Based Enamel - Machine Gray). Thankfully my wife was able to track down a ham radio guy who puts them on the side. Don't think I want to go up there without a climbing harness.

It also came with a working DB4 antenna which I'm in the process of hooking up to the digital tuner on the RCA DVD-R/VCR Combo I picked up a while back. I tested the feed to the bedroom TV's digital tuner and was pretty impressed by the broadcast quality of about half of the local Peoria channels in 1080. Just added a grounding block and earth rod to the run yesterday. I'm saving threading the cable up the wall until after the presents are opened and there is some room to work behind the TV.

lgodave,

There wasn't a cable-eye controller for the UTVs was there? I have one for an older JVC S-VHS deck I used with my old RCA D-TV tuner, but I never got the two to play nice. Opting instead to just program both and add a few minutes either side of the program on the VCR side.

Seriously, I'm looking at media recording options since we have switched ISPs that now allow for streaming. Who knows, maybe it is time to look at D-TV's offerings?

Merry Christmas,
Ed

Will do, same rural setting here as well. My new ISP supplied us with an "axcess-tel CMDA 1xEV-DO" cell modem that is sitting on the corner of my desk. It is 3G (with a 4 port hub/router and WiFi) and we're current peaking downloads at 1.8Mbs, but when the trees leaf out it can drop down to 178kBs. My cellular service believes that with a higher mount, we can see it boost up to near their max of 3Mbs. I haven't monitored the Up versus Down, but I understand it is not 1:1. Still way faster than Hughes' 20:1 ratio and no FAP limits, streaming here we come.

We just put up the TV tower and will have the ISP and tower guy back this spring to hang the Yagi (and a decent FM antenna). I have to move some things around in the basement before then as well. I had my HughesNet modem down there with a long run of RG-6 to a utility closet that I have my printer and hub in. The cellular antenna cabling is heavily sheilded and runs around $2 a foot; I need to run some more Cat5e (or 6) to reduce the antenna cable run.

On a sidenote, we used to subscribe to the HughesNet home plan beginning back in 2003. I ran a WinXP tweak that turned the "Windows background update bandwidth stream" down to zero and saw the 784kBs jump to 1.1Mbs on a DW6000 1-Watt modem. It pretty much stayed there for the 8 years we had their service except during peak evening hours. I'm a morning person and often surfed during their FAP free hours so it was my wife that complained most about it.