Monday, October 4, 2010

Problem Getting Denver Stations

When we went to being fulltime RVers in 2007 we thought we could get by with using our batwing to pick up local stations and cut out on the expense of satellite TV.  Well, that lasted about a month…Jim without a lot of TV stations to surf through?  Are you crazy?

We opened up another account with DISH while camphosting in South Fork, Colorado.  Of course, we had to declare ourselves as ‘nomads’ without a permanent stick and brick.  At that time we had several choices of cities to be declared as our “local stations”….New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles as I remember.  So naturally we chose Denver as it had always been our local station while living in Alamosa.

We have been able to “get” our Denver local stations and Denver news, etc., everywhere we have traveled from South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Florida and Arizona…no trouble.  That is until we got here to Campbellsville.  When Jim set up the satellite dish here all of a sudden the Denver stations wouldn’t come in as a transponder but as a spot beam.

When we called DISH tech services we were told we never could have gotten Denver stations outside of their area.  Well, up to two days before we arrived in Campbellsville we were watching Denver news just fine in the Chicago area, thank you very much, and have received Denver stations everywhere for the last three years.  Then the tech said something really stupid, “you must be mistaken”….oh, yea, we only imagined we watched Denver Fox, Denver news and all the Bronco games for the last three years while traveling all across the country.

So we are watching the local Kentucky news stations and a couple of the major network stations with our batwing and then switch over to our satellite DISH for Foodnetwork, History channel, CNN, etc.  It’s a major drag, but I don’t want to change over to NY and LA if we can somehow get our local Denver stations back when we leave here.

Anybody got any ideas of what may have happened to all of a sudden get our local stations spot beamed to us instead of getting them through a transponder?

Remember, you are loved.

5 comments:

  1. Bummer ! We usually change our service address and leave our billing address the same. That gives us the local channels where ever we are at. But we are with Directv so I have no idea about Dish.

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  2. Did you subscribe with America Direct for the Denver HD Channels or is Denver a local area selection as part of your Dish subscription?
    If Denver is a local Dish you have been lucky for the past years and should lose it when you travel out of the beam area as we do with our Salt Lake Stations, if America Direct you should still get them.

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  3. We signed an RV waiver when we first subscribed and Denver was one of the five Super Cities offered. Another RVer emailed us today and said they too had Denver for their "local" channel and have kept it all over the country for several years. Two weeks ago(same time as us) they too "lost" their Denver feed and received the same message that they were outside the viewing area. Seems something changed with DISH around Sept. 21st

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  4. When we first went on the road, we also had those four cities to choose from for distant networks. When we stay put for several months—like the last 3 months in Colorado or the next 6 months in Arizona, we change our service address with Dish and get local channels at that location. When we travel, we go to a company called Sobongo and they provide distant channels from New York or San Francisco. I think you have to pay for 6 months at a time. Search for “distant networks” on the web to find them. I don’t know how you got Denver channels in Chicago. Just lucky, I guess. The federal government now requires that local channels only be available by a spotbeam within 250 miles of the city.

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  5. John and Carol - thanks for the information. Yea, we have been getting Denver for our local stations all over the country...everywhere we've traveled for three years. Guess that's over now.

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