King-Dome Satellite

Looking to replace my old satellite on the tripod.( Takes way too much time setting up and too unstable ) Have seen King-Dome in Camping World, and was wondering if this was the way to go?or another such brand. When camping at a spot for a couple of nights,then moving on, it's a royal pain setting up the old tripod type.

We have the VuQube V20 by the same company. I would highly recommend it. Just put it out on the ground and turn it on. It finds the satellite without a hitch. We took it with us on our trip out west during the summer and again to Texas last month. We have never had a problem with reception. We have DirecTV. It will not work with the HD receivers, but we are roughing it. The design is good in high winds. It doesn't budge. We got ours at Camping World. We have never gotten reception using the park cable hookup.

That sounds good. Looked at that,abit more economical too.Thanks

I was told that Vu-Qube for HD only works on Dishnet. I would like to get one when it works on Directv that I have at home.

I have the kingdome and love it. I have dishnetwork and have no problems at all. What I like is that there is no setup like the vu-cube. cost was about 1100.00

I like the fact it's attached to the roof,no lowering/raising it.
Is it simple to find the signal each time?
I use my home receiver for inside. Does it just hook up to the coaxial cable off the "bat antenna" on the roof? Remove the "bat antenna"??

One thing no one has mentioned is that if you camp in trees, you stand the chance of getting no signal from your roof mounted dish.

I carry the tripod and go through the hassle of set up because of where I camp, sometimes I have to put the tripod and dish 50 feet away to pull a signal.

Trees are a reason that I like the VuCube. It comes with a long cord that will reach almost everywhere. The reception is good even through trees that don't have many leaves on them.

Silver, i have a King Dome installed on my Cat.
If i were to do it again i would save the money.
Here on the East Coast most camping is wooded and now i carry a portable dish and tripod due to 90% of the time not getting a signal through the trees.
Save your money and go with the Vu Cube.

you guys definitely have great points. the only bad thing about the roof mounted kingdome is tree interferance. it is simple to find the satelites, just basically press two buttons, takes me about 2 minutes to locate. but isnt the purpose of camping to get away from reality for a while, so who cares if you dont have tv on every trip.

we do alot of dry camping on the beach, when we stay for a week long trip the tv sometimes never comes on, and when it does it is only for a short while and I have 4 kids.

Eric wrote:we do a lot of dry camping on the beach, when we stay for a week long trip the tv sometimes never comes on, and when it does it is only for a short while and I have 4 kids.

Same here. I have the electronic toys in the trailer and rarely get to use them. The trailer is mainly used for cooking and sleeping. I subscribe to Dish so things may be a little different for DirecTV.

On the HD comment...It should work on HD receivers, but I remember the problem was the dual tuner receivers HD or SD. You can however, run the dual tuner receiver with only one connection. It's not fun, but it is possible. The problem is when the cube needs to switch to another bird location in the sky. If one tuner is requesting 110° orbital location and the other at 129°, it doesn't work. At home my dual tuner receivers use a separator which is like a signal combiner but allows only one cable run from the switch at the dish. This only works because the switch can manage the multiple sat locations whereas the Vcube can't do more than one at a time.

I ended up saving my money and keeping the tripod. I point it to 119° and get everything I normally watch. I use an old single LNB dish and an old Dish DVR 508 single tuner receiver. My dual tuner HD boxes aren't necessary for the amount of TV I watch when camping. After all the hassle, I watch about 1 hour total for the half hour of setup time to get everything out and aimed.