Satellite Dish Inspection Fee

[Dark Eyes]

Let me preface this by saying I do not own a satellite dish, I don't plan to own one, and I don't work for a satellite TV provider.

The new $50 satellite dish inspection fee has to rank right up there with the dumbest things ever approved by the Omaha city council.

What threat to public health & safety do satellite dishes represent, that they need to be inspected by the city?

What's next? Are they going to require city inspections of residential swing sets and basketball hoops?

How many city council members were paid off by Cox Communications to enact this ridiculous fee?

[SychoBC]

Glad I live outside city limits. There is no way I'd pay this.

[Bosco55David]

I agree that it's pretty stupid, but whatever, it happens.

[TechnicalDisaster]

So the city is requiring furloughs and layoffs, and will now have to hire new employees to do Satellite inspections? Nice.

I have a problem with the math though....

The Omaha City council just proposed the fee -- which would affect the city's roughly 35,000 dishes -- Tuesday night, and A Better Way Service's Dewain Auten already said the fee may cost his business an employee or two.

Councilman Chris Jerram pitched the plan. He said the fee could generate close to $2 million if it is adopted. Jerram said the plan is about safety, making sure the city's dishes are all properly installed.

It would take 40,000 inspections at $50 a pop to equal $2 million, and that doesn't include the cost to the city to do the inspection! If Omaha really does have 35,000 dishes, that would mean one person would have to do 100 inspections per day x 365 days to get done. How many people would it take to inspect thoroughly enough to even spot whatever it is they're looking for? This will be no boon to the city after the new department is created with a manager and 3 inspectors? 4 inspectors? + vehicles, tools, ladders, registrars, billing, etc.

[mrdwhsr]

Omaha faces not only the cost to do the inspections but the cost to defend against the lawsuit the brought by DirectTV and/or DISH. I suspect that Qwest has already contacted DirectTV with this. It will end up in federal court as a restraint of interstate commerce case. The folks and Direct and DISH are always ready to challenge any neighborhood covenants that restrict installation of a dish. I don't think this will be any different.

I suppose the city will amend this to require a $50 inspection fee for cable hook-ups and roof-top antennas. It still doesn't make sense..sounds like it will generate more costs than revenues.

[TechnicalDisaster]

When I had Dish Network, I didn't want the dish attached to my house, so I made the installer put a pole in the ground at the corner of my house and mount the dish on the pole. Would I still have to have my dish inspected if I still had it?

Has there been any safety incident that has been recorded in Omaha from a poorly installed Dish? Just curious.

[Brad]

A good idea for the "visual pollution photo contest" would be to take a photo of all the satellite dishes on the front porches of houses on the Levenworth Street Exit of 480.... I don't care what the preference is as far as cable or satellite, but a satellite in the front of a house looks retarded!

[Big E]

Reeeeeecall-ah....



(get it?... Ricola... Recall-ah... whatever.)

[TechnicalDisaster]

Reeeeeecall-ah....



(get it?... Ricola... Recall-ah... whatever.)

This was the council's plan, not the mayors. Unless you're intention is to recall the council too...

[TechnicalDisaster]

Saw this article today:

http://omaha.com/article/20090903/NEWS01/709039958

The city would spend $113,000 to hire two inspectors. The dishes would have to meet electrical and structural safety standards and wind-resistance rules.

They'll have to cover 50 inspections every single day (roughly 6+ per hour in an 8 hour shift) to inspect the city the first day. Does that 100K include vehicles, gas, & equipment?

And more importantly:

A DirecTV spokesman said the fee is counter to federal law, “anti-consumer and anti-competitive.”

“We will work swiftly and cooperatively with the City of Omaha to correct it,” said spokesman Robert Mercer.

uh oh....

[nebugeater]

From satelliteguys.us this is a direct copy / past of post #57 on this topic. If this is a factual post and the response is as stated from this councilman what a shame.


http://www.satelliteguys.us/dish-networ ... ha-ne.html

Today, 12:23 PM
jericko
SatelliteGuys Freshman Join Date: Jul 18th, 2006
Posts: 14

So I emailed all 4 City Council members who voted for this, and just stated they should be ashamed for passing this, and I wanted to know why this did not apply to cable. I did not use any profanities. 2 have sent me very kind emails, but I want to post my response from Garry Gernandt:

"Spoken truly by a disgusting uninformed human, you should be ashamed of yourself."

That is the exact email he sent me, what a self serving low life. Here is his contact info:

Garry Gernandt

District 4

(402) 444-5522

[email protected]

[HskrFanMike]

I've been considering switching to Dish Network, but I'm not exactly unsympathetic to the city on this one. Cox pays rights fees to the city; the satellite companies don't.

That being said, this is a stupid proposal that harasses citizens and doesn't add much to the city bottom line.

[Big E]

This was the council's plan, not the mayors. Unless you're intention is to recall the council too...

Exactly.

No intention to be partisan here, but I don't think we have very intelligent people running our city or voting for our city's leaders.

[Omababe]

I've been considering switching to Dish Network,

I will probably never do business with Dish Network! Main reason is that they kept phoning me over and over and over and over despite the fact I told them countless times to take me off of their calling list!

[nebugeater]

I've been considering switching to Dish Network,

I will probably never do business with Dish Network! Main reason is that they kept phoning me over and over and over and over despite the fact I told them countless times to take me off of their calling list!

Dish has had some problems with this and if that is your reason for not going with them so be it. The are getting blamed for calls from independent markers that take advantage of commission programs that Dish has and sometimes they are two or three steps removed. Granted, Dish has ultimate control but they squash one and another pops up. It is like a lot of the mailings you get saying Dish and Direct. It is third party. I would never recommend dealing with anyone but Dish ( or Direct) Directly with the numbers off their official web site.

[Stargazer]

Outside of perhaps not having any other option... is there ANY reason one would want satellite television??

[Bosco55David]

Outside of perhaps not having any other option... is there ANY reason one would want satellite television??

[Uffda]

Outside of perhaps not having any other option... is there ANY reason one would want satellite television??

Use to have the DISH network when I lived in Wyoming but that was years ago -- how does their monthly price compare with Cox's?

[nebugeater]

Outside of perhaps not having any other option... is there ANY reason one would want satellite television??

Yes

Price
channel selection
Better equipment
Now More HD
better reliability )( no matter what the cable co says)

I have Dish and Cox both coming to the house. Cox for phone and internet. When I first moved in to Gretna COX was not an option but the local cable company in Gretna was and I went with Dish for the expanded offering. When COX rolled in I looked hard a switching but the value was not there. Looked at it again before upgrading to HD and the same existed. My experience with COX for the services I get is that it is very reliable but in my overall experience with DISH for 10 + years and cable from expertise providers for 15 + years before that is that the reliability of my SAT will beat any cable I have ever had by a wide margin.

I know many people who have the option and choose Dish or Direct over a cable company and will never go back.

[Stargazer]

I have no experience with it... but my daughter does, and said that it's true that reception suffers during storms. That would make satellite tv a non-starter for me. I also have (well, they're starting to leave the house now, so I guess it's not quite as big an issue now) 5 people in my family... and 7 televisions. What would it cost to hook 7 televisions up to satellite? (realizing I only carry HD on two of them)

[SabrinaFaire]

Outside of perhaps not having any other option... is there ANY reason one would want satellite television??

Yes

Price
channel selection
Better equipment
Now More HD
better reliability )( no matter what the cable co says)

I have Dish and Cox both coming to the house. Cox for phone and internet. When I first moved in to Gretna COX was not an option but the local cable company in Gretna was and I went with Dish for the expanded offering. When COX rolled in I looked hard a switching but the value was not there. Looked at it again before upgrading to HD and the same existed. My experience with COX for the services I get is that it is very reliable but in my overall experience with DISH for 10 + years and cable from expertise providers for 15 + years before that is that the reliability of my SAT will beat any cable I have ever had by a wide margin.

I know many people who have the option and choose Dish or Direct over a cable company and will never go back.

Yep. Exactly. Before we moved we had a dish and if we could have a dish at our apartment now, we'd still have it. You get a lot more for your money and DirecTV was hella more reliable than Comcast which was our option back in Chicago. I'd rather have Cox than Comcast but I'd rather have DirecTV over either. I had it for about 10 years and in that time a storm knocked out service ONCE. Cable was out all the time, you could sneeze and it would go out. Granted, we haven't had those kinds of problems with Cox, and to be fair before we had the dish the local cable company was run by AT&T which had bought out TCI, eventually AT&T's cable division was bought by Comcast, but I've heard from other people that Comcast hasn't gotten any better.

[nebugeater]

I have no experience with it... but my daughter does, and said that it's true that reception suffers during storms. That would make satellite tv a non-starter for me. I also have (well, they're starting to leave the house now, so I guess it's not quite as big an issue now) 5 people in my family... and 7 televisions. What would it cost to hook 7 televisions up to satellite? (realizing I only carry HD on two of them)

If there is a lot of storm interruptions then there is an issue. It is not interruption free but if there is more than one or two a summer with durations of more than 5 min then there is probably an alignment issue. I have been sat for 10+ years as mentioned and my weather related outages are very rare and of short length. Granted this is not the best time for an outage but I do have an OTA antenna and can get locals that way and that is what i would be watching in a storm. I have know others to experience long outages and in every case a re-peaking of the dish by someone that knows what they are doing solves this and reduces outages a lot.

As for what does it cost. there is not one way to answer. I would start with how many different channels do you want to watch at the same time? I have three ( used to be two before adding want) tuners and have them in a central locations and feed them to the TV's through a modulator. I can watch OTA on any tv and use CH63 to modulate tuner #1 and CH66 to modulate tuner #2 I have a RF remote for the sat receivers in each location and can see either Sat receiver from any TV. The Primary TV now has HD and the receiver is there and fed with HDMI. I have a second HD set with a Component feed going to it.

It may seem like a lot of install but it is rather basic and gives me more flexibility than any cable install I can see myself doing.

[thenewguy]

last week my wife and i were at the hospital for our son, and when it was pouring out we couldn't get about half the channels to come in. The hospital uses dish. My mom has the same issue, as do many people i know that have satellite dishes, regardless of the company. Doesn't make any difference to me, i'm just making a point.

[RegisResident]

While I'm a cox subscriber, I have heard that satellite is better for HDTV- with cable HDTV the signal is compressed to fit as much "stuff" (internet, phone, analog channels, etc.) on the cable line whereas with satellite the signal is not compressed (or not as compressed) so the images appear sharper and less grainy.

[Brad]

While I'm a cox subscriber, I have heard that satellite is better for HDTV- with cable HDTV the signal is compressed to fit as much "stuff" (internet, phone, analog channels, etc.) on the cable line whereas with satellite the signal is not compressed (or not as compressed) so the images appear sharper and less grainy.

I heard Cox was going to make changes and additions now that analog is gone.

[Brad]

Awesome Signature Pic Big E!

[almighty_tuna]

Awesome Signature Pic Big E!

+1

[RegisResident]

While I'm a cox subscriber, I have heard that satellite is better for HDTV- with cable HDTV the signal is compressed to fit as much "stuff" (internet, phone, analog channels, etc.) on the cable line whereas with satellite the signal is not compressed (or not as compressed) so the images appear sharper and less grainy.

I heard Cox was going to make changes and additions now that analog is gone.

Cox still has a bunch of analog channels- they actually covert a number of digital channels back to analog so that their subscribers who don't have digital tuners can still watch TV. Cox has been moving some channels off to digital to free up bandwidth but one of their big selling points before the digital TV transition is that people who subscribe to Cox don't need to worry about getting a converter box. Cox isn't as bad as some of the other cable companies that really compress their channels- I remember reading an article a while ago about how some HD enthusiasts were very disappointed with the effect the compression had on their HD quality.

[bbinks]

The only thing I'd like to see, is some regulation as to where the dish can be installed. When I go get my monthly haircut, I pass a house that has their dish mounted on a wood post (the ones that you would use for a fence), in their front yard.

Do these dish companies have to obtain a permit to install? When I had a fence installed, a permit was requied.

[GetUrban]

While I'm a cox subscriber, I have heard that satellite is better for HDTV- with cable HDTV the signal is compressed to fit as much "stuff" (internet, phone, analog channels, etc.) on the cable line whereas with satellite the signal is not compressed (or not as compressed) so the images appear sharper and less grainy.

I heard Cox was going to make changes and additions now that analog is gone.

Cox still has a bunch of analog channels- they actually covert a number of digital channels back to analog so that their subscribers who don't have digital tuners can still watch TV. Cox has been moving some channels off to digital to free up bandwidth but one of their big selling points before the digital TV transition is that people who subscribe to Cox don't need to worry about getting a converter box. Cox isn't as bad as some of the other cable companies that really compress their channels- I remember reading an article a while ago about how some HD enthusiasts were very disappointed with the effect the compression had on their HD quality.

Kind of off the satellite topic, but I hope Cox eventually moves away from assuming so many people DON"T have digital TV's. I hate the fact that I would have to subscribe to an upgraded service plan and have a COX box to receive already available HDTV channels that my HDTV is capable of receiving. Right now with the basic COX plan (without a COX box) I can pick-up CBS, NBC, ABC, KPTM, CW, IPTV, NPTV (PBS) in HD, but nothing else in HD. MY HDTV picks-up those HD channels in the channel 105.1 - 108.3 range, and also picks up the analog signals in the old channel 2-72 range. It would be nice to get all of the digital channels available without the added COX box. I say let the people who still use analog TVs have the extra COX box and pay for the down-grade back to analog.


...Oh, and I should add that the new proposed satellite dish inspection fee is stupid & unfair to that industry and it's subscribers, and will most likely not stand.