hi smokie and chris...to answer ur questions....you are probably correct about the discreets, cause I havent fooled around enough with the various remotes to answer ur question, guess i'm not a remote control person...but i am a satellite and hme theater person to be sure...as far as TIVO, i have heard that the recording time is very short in duration, with relation to the cost of the hard drive ,,,and larger drives right now are cost prohibitive...but things will drop in price , as the technology involved is excellant.....
also remember', u could actually build a com- puter 'with the proper hard ware , video cards ,and sound cards to do the same thing, using it as a proprietory-copy only computer...maybe for not much more than a TIVO with a big hard drive.....puter stuff is real cheap right now, and prices are getting lower , not higher....check it out, i think i may be right.....as of late , i havent had any problem copying off of sony sat's.....also there is digital VHS vcr's out there by hughe's for one ....they also do an excellant job of copying right from the satellite rcvr.........and yes the signal in bad weather does suck, and it happens quite often with the 18'' dish system....the cure....use a 24'' dish, we use 4 or 5 a week around here in boston, peak it to MAXIMUM signal strength, and then tweak it again, and if that aint good enough, use one of the BRAND NEW 'surface mount technology' 4 way multi-switches in the line by Jayco, or even a bullet amp in the line would work.......there is something about the 'surface mount' tech units that
virtually TOTALLY eliminates the rain fade dropouts, cloud and snow dropouts, and pixelization problems.....had dropouts at our showroom on a dual LNB system, then hooked up the Jayco device, using only 2 of the 4 taps on the outputs, and after the last 2 months, have only had 1 or 2 visual dropouts that i know about,,,then hooked up all 4 output taps with the same success....Hmmmmmm maybe thats a solution to the lil' dish dropout problem.....but , in any case spend the extra money and go to a BIGGER DISH...the lil' 18incher just does'nt have enough gain