A guy’s guide for surviving that new dish
IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T noticed, the battle for your boob tube is heating up. Recently, satellite and cable TV companies have rolled out high-profile ad campaigns to attract customers, enlisting celebrities and ordinary folk to sell their services, from Danny DeVito and Laurence Fishburne reading DirecTV fan mail to the poor schlub in the Comcast ads forced to secure a wind-buffeted dish in a bucket of cement.
Although issues such as customer service (a recent study ranked dish service better than cable) and “signal fade” (a rare weather condition affecting dish reception) do exist, the biggest difference is the one nobody’s talking about -- the 20 inches of molded metal that a technician, or you, will bolt to your residence to snatch signals from the sky.
I found out -- the hard way -- that the big gray salad bowl could be a deal breaker. It started when I discovered that satellite service would allow me to record “Alias” and “The Sopranos” to one TiVo at the same time. In a quest to make my Sunday night TV recording session hassle-free, I started thinking about cutting the cable and doing the dish. That “thinking” turned into an odyssey involving a compass, FCC rulings and a refresher course in marital negotiations. In the end, I would remain dish-deprived, but my journey wasn’t a complete waste; along the way, I was able to compile the following list of things to consider before considering the dish:
Southern exposure
Southern exposure is the biggest factor in deciding whether a satellite dish is even feasible for you. Major providers in the area (DirecTV and Dish Network) require an unobstructed view of the southern sky, where the “satellite” part of the “satellite dish” equation is located. Your own sense of direction -- or a dime-store compass -- is all you should need to confirm the necessary line of sight and take into account trees that may grow to block your line of sight. I qualified on this count -- barely -- with a tiny sliver of sky off the fourth-floor, west-facing balcony.
Don’t fret -- too much -- about landlord permission. A January 1999 Federal Communications Commission ruling protects a renter’s right to put a dish anywhere he or she has “exclusive use,” like a patio or balcony, with a few safety and historical preservation exceptions. But if your apartment or condo lacks the requisite south-facing real estate, you will have to throw yourself on the mercy of the management to situate your antenna elsewhere on the premises.
The hole problem
Because the satellite dish is outside and most people watch television inside, the next consideration is how to get the signal from the dish to the tuner, a leg of the journey that still requires old-fashioned coaxial cable. If you won’t -- or can’t -- drill holes in the side of your home, you still have several options. First, you can try to find a suitable space through which to thread the cable, either near the eaves, around the foundation or even through a window-mounted air conditioner. Second, you can go into full do-it-yourselfer mode and use weatherstripping tape -- a window wedged shut with a length of broom handle is truly something to behold. Or you can do what professional dish installers do and use a flat coaxial cable connector, readily available online, that fits easily under doors and windows.
Dish versus diva
If you’ve got a line of sight to the southern sky and you’ve figured out the wiring, you may still have a wife to convince. I’m not trying to be sexist here but most men I know would willingly allow a TV news van to park on the lawn and run monster cable through the dining room wall if it meant not having to get off the couch and fiddle with the VCR. Most women (and by “most women” I mean my bride of 11 months) would not.
Suss out the situation with this simple approach: Take a large round metal object, say a wok, a garbage-can lid or one of the cymbals from your son’s drum kit. Lash said object to the spot you envision putting the dish. Hide in nearby underbrush. Observe spousal response. Write down spousal response and formulate plan accordingly. Book dinner in a crowded public place. Discuss plan.
As a bargaining point, offer to disguise the dish under a natural-looking artificial boulder ($270) or camouflage it with specially made plastic shrubbery called DishCamo ($89), both available online. Tell her you’ll paint or otherwise decorate the offending gray disc to blend in -- or stand out. Bob Marsocci, a spokesman for DirecTV, said the company had discussed the possibility of offering logo-decorated dishes. “What about the Simpsons, the Dodgers or the Lakers?” he said. “Who wouldn’t want something like that?” Marsocci, of course, has never met my wife.
But all the boulders and fake greenery in the world couldn’t persuade my bride to compromise the aesthetic integrity of our fourth-floor balcony, nor could the promise to paint the sucker pink. The downside is a weekly Sunday-night scramble to set a VCR in one room and a TiVo in the other, but the upside is I’m still married. And I haven’t given up yet -- I have the sneaking suspicion that as soon as someone finds a way to make a satellite antenna look like Russell Crowe or a Gucci handbag, my dish will come true.
The FCC Fact Sheet on Placement of Antennas is at www.fcc.gov/mb/facts /otard.html, more information on DirecTV can be found at www.directv.com, and the Dish Network is at www.dishnetwork.com. DishCamo and artificial boulders can be ordered at www.satellitedish.com.
