ATTN DirecTV subscribers who live in apartments:

[StormShaman]

My hubby and I are getting the DirecTV installers out to my place this Thursday, and I have a couple questions--specifically:

1) How many trees (if any) are around your building/complex?

1a) How far away from your building are they?

2) Are you on a ground-floor apartment or not?

We really REALLY want to be rid of Time Warner, so we're hoping we can get DirecTV--any help y'all can give would be just spiffy.

Thanks! :)

[Guyute]

If you have a compass stand somewhere in your back yard (or balcony, whatever)...
face kind of SW... though, slightly more S than W. If your arm is pointed straight out (and considered zero degrees), raise it to about 30 degrees. that's roughly the range of the bird.

as for what trouble trees cause... well... depends on the density. a branch or two in the way really isn't going to make much of a difference. most of a pine tree may. several pine trees Will.

if you have a lower line of site to the SW, you can check for Dish as well... the azimuth for their birds are slightly lower than DTV.

oh, you can google 'directv dish pointing'.. there's a link on their site somewhere to let you plug in your zip code. you probably don't have anything to measure azimuth.. but you can get directl coords for which direction you'd be facing.

[MeanGene]

FYI, don't know if you have it or not, but a lot of apartments require that you get renters insurance to have Satellite installed.

[Shell]

everyone in an apartment absolutely should have renters insurance anyway!!!!! It is so cheap and so valuable. Unfortunately I did not have it when I was robbed for everything I owned and I had to completely rebuild with no money!

[Guyute]

yeah seriously, I think it was like a couple bucks a month or something when we were last in a townhouse.

[SouthernHockeyChick]

I think our renter's insurance *might* be $80/year? And seriously, like Shell said, get robbed one time without it and you'll be kicking yourself.....we did. :mad:

We live in a townhome set up in duplexes and our dish is on a pole in the sideyard, so it's not your general appartment situation. We have LOTS of trees around our place, though, but the trees are a bit off the buidling itself...we have a small yard with no trees. We had originally wanted to get Dish but their angle did not work with our situation....too low for the tall trees. I had him check the angle first thing and it took him like 2 minutes to tell me it wasn't gonna work. No problem with DirecTV, though. There are some branches in the line of ours that cause no problem, but they are fairly far off (meaning high in the sky). The only time we ever have an issue is once in a while when it's just about to start raining we'll lose the signal for about 2 minutes. Not often at all, though. Much less than our cable went out. :roll:

[PennsylvaniaCanesFan]

My renter's insurance was around $88 per year. Plus they knocked about $60 off my car insurance for being a multiple policy holder. How can you pass that up?