At my last job, we wanted recordings of news broadcasts whenever we were in the news, so we could make a digital archive of all of our press appearances. We had a television antenna, but this wouldn’t help us when we wanted to capture networks like CNN, C-SPAN and other ‘cable-only’ networks. Personally I had always favored a ‘wired’ connection over a ‘wireless’ one, and knew about problems getting a signal sometimes through rain or snow. But due to the location of our building, it was prohibitively expensive to run cable TV to our site. So we checked out Dish Network Satellite (www.dishnetwork.com) and I was surprised at how cheap it was, both per-month and to get the equipment. We were also leery of satellite tv because we used to have a huge C-band dish on our roof but we always had problems with it blowing over and trying to keep it aligned. However, the newer smaller dish has had very few problems along those lines. I want to say that in more than three years we have only had a tech out one time to re-align the dish… and our business is in a VERY windy location!
The installation went surprisingly well. The technician took about three hours from start to finish, including mounting the dish, running coaxial cable to two separate locations in our building, and setting up the boxes. Since then, we have upgraded the boxes to get more features (including DVR capabilities) and it was easy to buy them off the shelf, call Dish Network and get the card ID numbers added to our account. In terms of programming, we found that it was pretty easy to customize which channels we could receive; for example, our business is related to spaceflight and exploration, so we were able to get a NASA TV feed added to our package. And the billing was easy to set up as a recurring payment on one of our corporate purchasing cards. We also had spaces in our building that we rented out, and we found that we could charge a premium for making Dish Network programming available during our clients’ events. It was easy to call Dish Network (their number is 888.825.2557) and add specific Dish Network channels if we didn’t have them already. This came in really handy when the World Series was on and we didn’t have TBS in our package! It was just a five minute phone call.
One cool thing that we did was use Baluns to convert the analog signal coming out of the box to travel over cat5 (ethernet) cable. You can’t plug it into an ethernet hub or switch, but if you have patch panels in your communications closets, you can directly patch a signal around to whatever room without having to run coax to that room. Think of it as one long ethernet cord from end to end, but the baluns make it into an A/V cable instead. If the signal couldn’t make it that far, we sometimes used a 75 ohm amplifier to boost the signal and get the job done. The downside was, you can’t easily change the channel because the receiver box is in another room. But if you know ahead of time that you want it tuned to a specific channel, that’s a pretty good solution.
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