Debbyc from Minneapolis writes:

Do you have to have a HD TV to get Dish?
I’ve had friends that complain they lose TV with the slightest wind or rain, is that still a frequent problem with Dish?

Debbyc,

No, you don’t have to have an HDTV. Their receivers work with older models of TVs.

As far as loss of signal with satellite TV, your mileage may vary. In one home I had DISH Network for 3 years and I don’t remember it EVER going out. I live in Utah so we also deal with a lot of snow. Once we moved we got DISH again and it was great for about 2 years, then it started going out frequently with minor overcast. I suspect that it got moved a bit. Rather than paying for a technition to come look at it and adjust it, I just switched to DIRECTV. I didn’t have issues with DIRECTV after that (we had DIRECTV for over 2 years).

Then we moved once again to a new area and I got Comcast. Oddly enough, even though there was no satellite we kept having issues during bad storms. It made no sense to me. We are now back with Directv. It has gone out a couple times with bad snow storms. It seems to me that the best reception we had was with our first house where we had it mounted on the side of our house rather than the roof.

I hope this helps.

Dustin
http://www.direct-vs-dish.com

Tom from Carson City, Nevada writes:

We’ve had Dish Network so long now I can’t even remember when we didn’t. I only know we dumped Comcast fr it. We’ve had virtually no problems with our sets. One of them we use for our RV and that has been a lifesaver for us. Getting weather in the ‘outback’ of Nevada has kept us out of trouble many times. It’s always been relatively easy to set up our dish when on trips.

The home DVR is set up with two TV’s. One in the living room and one in our office. Works great. Now I’m going to mount another dish on my shop and use the RV box to run it when we’re not out on a trip. I can’t wait. I’ll use it mainly for music out there, and since Dish has their music PLUS Sirius Satellite music, there’s no problem finding a music channel I like.

I’m sure DirecTV is pretty much the same, but we’ve been loyal Dish subscribers for years and see no reason to change. Their customer service has always been very good, the few times we needed to call them, and, as someone else mentioned, the people on the other end always speak English.