[Ray H]

I'll avoid the minutiae of who offers the best sales and service other than to point out that independent installers are contracted with to do the dirty work. However, there are a few recent (as in yesterday) developments you should be aware of: the whole U.S. DBS scene has just gone topsy-turvey with the announced merger of DirecTV to Dish Network. As I understand it, the parent company's name will remain "Echostar", but the combined DBS name will become "DirecTV" after the merger is finalized - the name "Dish Network" will fall by the wayside. The receiver manufacturing arms of each, Hughes Network Services and Echostar will, along with their respective engineering teams, be merged, though I'm unsure which name will prevail. (I suspect HNS.) Charlie Ergen (Dish Network's CEO) announced yesterday on Fox News Channel that there will eventually be a total receiver swapout for users of both current services with a new access card system. No one knows an accurate timeline at this point. No one knows whether the merger will survive regulatory scrutiny. Everyone has his own opinion, though. If you follow through with your proposed purchase plan, you probably won't need an extra multiswitch in the attic. Make sure your dish comes with a 4x4 multiswitch, though - that'll easily handle signals from both slots (101 W and 119 W - and 110 W, though it's not used for that much in DirecTV's scheme of things) and supply up to four receivers. The multiswitch that comes with the elliptical dish is powered by the receiver through the coax, and switches on independent command from all receivers via a 22 KHz tone transmitted by each receiver through the coax, too. The LNBs are also powered by the receiver transmitted voltage through the coax, too. The salient part of all this techno-barf is that each receiver will have independent ability to tune any subscribed channel regardless what channel the other receivers are tuned to.