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Does anyone know if you can receive the DISH netword or Direct TV satellites from the USA in Costa Rica? You can do this by using a larger antenna and then of course you have topay for a subscription in the USA and bring your USA receiver down to CR. We do this in the US. We have a house with 6 hookups and 5 other people take a receiver in their RVs or whatever. I pay about $150 total a month split 6 ways is $25 a month. A better deal than cable. Don’t hook it in to the phone line so you can’t order any PPV movies but you get hundreds of channels. Better than Direct TV in Costa Rica.
DirecTV **Latin America** is available in Costa Rica just as good ol’ DirecTV is available in the U.S. There are no pay-per-view movies and most of the programming is in Spanish (surprise!). You get CNN International which originates in Hong Kong and does a much better job of covering the world than CNN from the U.S. does.
DirecTV Latin America is a subscription service, just as it is in the U.S. It uses a 1.2 meter dish. You can rent or buy the hardware.
The alternative is to receive the U.S.-source DishNetwork signal — IF you are far enough north in Costa Rica to be able to see the satellite. You would be watching the very same signal that is beamed to U.S. subscribers.
There are two ways to get DishNetwork in Costa Rica. First, you can buy the hardware and enroll with DishNetwork as if you lived in the U.S. You must pay by credit card and you must have a U.S. mailing address. The programming packages cost what they cost in the U.S. The hardware includes a 2.4 dish.
The second option is to buy a 2.4 or 3.0 meter dish from Don Paul (who does business as Dr.Dish) and the tuners you need. Don’s set-up also accesses DishNetwork’s U.S. signal, but there is no monthly cost. Again, you must be far enough north in Costa Rica to be on a line of sight to the DishNetwork satellite that orbits over North America. DishNetwork does not do business outside the U.S., so the signal that is accessible here is simply “floating around” in the air. If you can receive it, you can watch it.
We have recently converted from DirecTV Latin America to Dr. Dish’s DishNetwork access system. So far, with a 2.4 meter dish, it works very well. We get most of the pay-per-view channels for free. We get local broadcast channels (ABC, NBC, CBS, etc) from New York and Los Angeles. We get a slew of Fox channels from all over. We get the typical cable/satellite service assortment of non-broadcast channels (HGTV, TMC, ESPN, DIS, etc, etc). We get Sirrus and some other music channels.
The only drawbacks to the DishNetwork systems (Dr. Dish’s or the one you pay for) are these. First, they are more susceptible to “rain blackout” here than in the U.S. When there is a lot of water in the air, you lose the signal. This is mostly a rainy season problem. The other problem is that as the earth’s seasons change, the signal from the satellite may be weaker and you may not get all the channels. Dr. Dish is addressing both these problems with his new, 3.0 meter dish which apparently resolves both problems.
I’m fairly certain that you can get Dr. Dish in Puriscal; David, whom I met on a George Lundquist tour, is further north than that. As David points out, though, the further south you go, the more interference/weak signals/likely rainouts you’ll face.
Jim Parish
leaving for Medford, Oregon in the morning
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