Motosat Satellite Antenna /Winegard / RF Mogul

January 20, 2016, 12:32:55 pm

NO NEED TO REPLACE MOTOSAT ANTENA

I've had a Motosat SL5 for Direct TV for several years. I have been completely satisfied. Last fall we took a trip where had reason to ask the Motost to find the satellites approximately 25 times. It found the satellites in reasonable time with two exceptions. One, there were just too many trees. The second time I do not know what happened, but when I hit the find button a second time it worked fine. This happening coupled with the slow times to lock (20 minutes) caused me to start doing some research and talking to other Motosat users. I learned there had been some changes made to one or more of the transponders it uses for locating the correct settings. I talked to local Direct dealers and was told "The Motosats are junk, throw it away and get a Winegard." I then called the dealer who I had bought the Motosat from and he told me "Motosat is out of business and they can not be repaired, you need to get an RF Mogul, I can install one, for you, for $2,400." All of this is partly true, but not the whole story. I ended up buy An RF Mogul RE-1 controller and kept the Motosat antenna. The retail price of the RE-1 is $895 and it took me less than an hour to install. Now I have a supported controller, that I can get SW updates for and the time to lock is now less than 4 minutes.

Re: Motosat Satellite Antenna /Winegard / RF Mogul

Reply #1 – January 20, 2016, 01:20:01 pm

Yahoo Message Number: 104461

Thanks for sharing your path forward with the Motosat, it's and economical way to go.

Our CC came with an older generation domed KVH unit. We never activated it once we had bought the coach, going the first 3-4 years without satellite. (And we survived well, as when in good 4G/LTE coverage areas, streaming provides lots of opportunities:)! As well as we had several shows on DVD that we had never seen, several years of to catch up on. And then toss in a few hundred movies and concerts - we never lacked for rainy days kicking back with plenty to choose from...)

However, as we moved into our retirement mode of traveling, 3-6 months at a time, the DW insisted on seeing her college and pro Football games! So, it was time to choose a satellite service.

We went with DirecTV. We have a 4K TV, and wanted HD show content. Went back and forth between RF Mogul and Winegard Travler. I believed both will work well. I liked the ability to remove components of the RF Mogul to send in for service, if ever needed. But as I was talking with two different RV repair facilities, I asked how often they had had to remove a dish to be sent in for service. Both commented about tree limb impacted units needing to be replaced. But only one said they had removed a Travler to swap out under warranty. (But, they said in their opinion - the owner had not told the full story. They were pretty sure the coach had taken some kind of electronic hit. And being only two months old, Winegard had agreed to go ahead and replace the unit under warranty. The tech said he did not feel that was fair to Winegard.)

OK, I ended up with the Travler. Good sales price going on, and at the same time I bought he new Rayzar Automatic dome OTA antenna too. (As well as the new manual crank up Sensar IV set up in A/B mode with the Automatic. While on rare occasions, this will allow us to pull in a channel that may have been just on the fringe for the Rayzar Automatic. But he main reason was I wanted to have an inside the coach manual crank up antenna mast, to install WiFi antennas too.)

The Travler is working well for us so far, and suspect the RV Mogul would have too...

Best to all,

Smitty

04 Allure 31017

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