For anyone out there who has an RV or a Boat with a KVH satellite on it, I have pretty awesome news.
It has seemed like KVH has left us all in the dust for the past 6 months or so, what with only releasing products for DirecTV (their HDTV TriSat convertor, an LCD with built in DirecTV receiver, etc). After talking to a KVH Tech support guy on the phone today, he shared with me some pretty cool news:
1. It wasn't KVH's decision to do that - Dish was giving them the cold shoulder by saying they didn't want to support any third party products and basically they should just pound sand.
2. Now that DirecTV's going to a different band, pretty much everyone with these satellite receivers are going to have $5,000 pieces of garbage unless they switch to FTA - or Dish.
I already knew that I could get all of the Dish programming through the thing (HD works without a silly $1000 converter) - the annoying part is that I have to manually point to the 129 satellite and adjust it manually (I can't use it on gyro mode). I was basically calling up today to see if they've fixed that or if they were going to add the 129 to the satellite ID library in the next firmware update, because my programming just can't get the thing to lock on. (You can only get 1 satellite at a time with any of the gyro-RV/Marine units, btw.)
Well, the tech guy said "There will be an announcement in March or April about Dish's new commitment to KVH and their HD product." He told me the engineering guys were working on a firmware patch right now for the current satellite receivers so they could be programmed with the new network IDs, and I assume there will be some sort of new product line as well to go with it.
But hey, it's good news across the board that Dish sees an opportunity to jump ahead of DirecTV and is taking it. They were really being silly by not cooperating in the first place. It may be a relatively small number of units, but every RV I see seems to have a KVH satellite on it, and half the boats in my Marina have at least one of them - and they're coming standard on a lot of new SUVs, so...
It has seemed like KVH has left us all in the dust for the past 6 months or so, what with only releasing products for DirecTV (their HDTV TriSat convertor, an LCD with built in DirecTV receiver, etc). After talking to a KVH Tech support guy on the phone today, he shared with me some pretty cool news:
1. It wasn't KVH's decision to do that - Dish was giving them the cold shoulder by saying they didn't want to support any third party products and basically they should just pound sand.
2. Now that DirecTV's going to a different band, pretty much everyone with these satellite receivers are going to have $5,000 pieces of garbage unless they switch to FTA - or Dish.
I already knew that I could get all of the Dish programming through the thing (HD works without a silly $1000 converter) - the annoying part is that I have to manually point to the 129 satellite and adjust it manually (I can't use it on gyro mode). I was basically calling up today to see if they've fixed that or if they were going to add the 129 to the satellite ID library in the next firmware update, because my programming just can't get the thing to lock on. (You can only get 1 satellite at a time with any of the gyro-RV/Marine units, btw.)
Well, the tech guy said "There will be an announcement in March or April about Dish's new commitment to KVH and their HD product." He told me the engineering guys were working on a firmware patch right now for the current satellite receivers so they could be programmed with the new network IDs, and I assume there will be some sort of new product line as well to go with it.
But hey, it's good news across the board that Dish sees an opportunity to jump ahead of DirecTV and is taking it. They were really being silly by not cooperating in the first place. It may be a relatively small number of units, but every RV I see seems to have a KVH satellite on it, and half the boats in my Marina have at least one of them - and they're coming standard on a lot of new SUVs, so...
