Has anyone heard anything about promised 72.5 degree locals? or the status of the required FCC permission to relocate the satellite that will provide the service, anything at all.

I have been looking and I can't find out a thing.

Thanks

Nothing new for quite some time now.. Hopefully the Pegasus settlement last week will mean they are dropping their objection to the move, so maybe that'll help speed things up a little.

I saw a headline news under the DIRECTV ticker last week stating that FCC approved the 72.5 deg use... If you are interested, I believe I saw the note on Yahoo.

Indeed.. There are also several threads about it here, including this one:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...threadid=189811

This is good news!
I am going to track through Lyngsat the DirecTV 5 sat and will let you know if I see it's position changing on it's way to the 72.5 position.

In looking at the TLE data on Celestrak.com, it appears the telemetry hasn't been updated in a few days...

DIRECTV 5
1 27426U 02023A 04225.77512463 .00000002 00000-0 00000+0 0 4543
2 27426 0.0405 270.1500 0002872 241.0353 330.1253 1.00273312 8334

Today is "day 229" of the year and this data is from "day 225". In any case, this data, which was from before the FCC annoucement shows a stationary orbit, as expected. For those interested, I used Orbitron by Sebastian Stoff to track the movement of the Directv 7S satellite and it did a good, even for an amateur like me.

Hopefully it will start on the move today and get there by a couple weeks. That will leave them a couple weeks for testing and then my guess on a rollout schedule: 1st group of 8 Sept 23, 2nd group Sept 30, and last group Oct 7.

I think the funny thing will be, most of their customers in these markets won't have the 2nd dish installed when the service is turned on. So in that sense, the rollout should be less of an impact to customer service early on.

Also I haven't seen any explaination yet on how the additional dish is going to connect.

I have a spare dish so all I need to know is how they are going to merge the signals from the two dishes and where to get the required equipment.
As I understand it Directv will provide all the required equipment but I like to do my own installations.

Same here, it'll be a cold day in hell before I let one of their installation "professionals" touch my stuff!

I heard it would be with a high frequence combiner, but they would still have to add a multiswitch along the way to get the local signal on the other cables. Nothing official from D* yet.

the info is supposed to be released later on this week or early next week about how it is going to be done...at least that is what I'm hearing at work

about all i can tell ya guys is that ya its true that some locals will be coming from a fourth satellite (old 119 i imagine) and it will require a second dish. numerous areas have already been planned for this satellite (cant remember what and am not at work so i cant look it up, which i couldnt speculate at this point anyways sorry)

Man, I hope they get this going soon. I hate the idea of having to watch the new seasons of survior, and CSI via my crappy cable signal

I emailed DTV yesterday and asked what equipment I would need for the 72.5 locals. The response is below...some bizarre combination of a form letter from the 7S launch and a misinformed rep trying to update it:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for writing. We have great news! On May 4, 2004, we successfully
launched our new satellite which gives us the additional satellite
capacity to offer local channels in more cities, including the
Johnstown-Altoona, PA area. It takes about a month to test and get the
satellite ready for service, so we expect to have your local channels
available by mid 2004. However, until the satellite has been fully
deployed and tested, we can't tell you a specific date. Once we
announce that locals are available in your area, you can get them with your
existing dish.

We should be able to tell you more specific dates very soon, so please
keep checking DIRECTV channel 999. You can also look for the press
releases and media announcements in your area.

Thanks again for writing and stay tuned to DIRECTV.com for the latest
news and information about our services. We look forward to bringing
you your local channels.

Sincerely,

Rohit
DIRECTV Customer Service

I checked HTTP://WWW.Directv.com/locals today and the hardware requirements have changed.
It used to say any DirecTV receiver would work for locals. Now it says

"You can receive these local channels using DIRECTV Multi-Satellite Receiver with APG."

I guess my old Sony SAT A-4 that I use as a second receiver is going to have to be retired. Too bad as I really liked the RF remote control that it had.

Maybe DirecTV will make a deal on a new DirecTivo unit.

"Multi-Satellite Receiver with APG"
What's APG?

Advanced Program Guide...Basically a Multi-Sat Rcvr with a program guide that looks at least 3 days into the future programing

I guess, if your program guide has a Category called "Olympics" just above the Sports category; it is based on APG...

DirecTV Sat 5 is on the move as of Sat night 8/21 it was at 104.14 W it was at 119 on Friday if Lyng Sat info was right.

Lyng Sat says it is moving 1.96 deg each day. The math does not compute.

Well it is at least moving but if it has to get to 72.5 it has a ways to go.

Lyngsat doesn't update their info everyday, so it probably has been moving for the past week, but Lyngsat just updated it recently.

Does anybody know what this means? Will my GXCEBOT qualify as a multi-satellite receiver with APG? I may just have to stay "moved".

Supposedly any Directivo should work just fine.

Multisat I think means can get 101, 110, and 119

Yes your rcvr will work just fine for this. all DVR/TiVo's are multi-sat rcvrs.

It looks like 72.5 locals and the core satellites will only require one dish:
http://www.satelliteguys.us/showthr...?t=26334&page=5

sounds good if true !

Is this thing going to look like that huge, hideous SuperDish? 33 inches is pretty freaking huge.

The superdish is 36 inches wide, although IMO the ugliest part of the superdish is the massive lnb, hopefully D* lnb will be smaller, although it will have to pick up 5 positions instead of 3.