There are pros and cons of both the Slingbox and of a dish. With a dish, there are certainly other options beyond that of either a portable dish with a tripod ($100 or so) that you have to get out into the weather and setup, and that of a rather expensive automatic track-in-motion dome ($1200 and up).
There are cheaper domes ($700-$800), for one, domes that do not work while in motion but have one-button satellite location to acquire the satellite signal quickly. These slightly smaller domes are viable alternatives for the solo or those who do not need in-motion tracking. Another similar option is the Vu Qube that requires only a single coax to the unit and is powered by the satellite receiver tuner box. You use a remote control to orientate the internal antenna to point to and acquire the signal.
There's also the $300 Winegard crank-up dish that from inside the vehicle you use the crank to raise, rotate and lower the dish, and it has Digital Magic display that tells you precisely where to point the antenna to quickly capture the satellite signal. Raised position it's about 30" high and is about 8" in the lowered, travel position. With both the crank up with Digital Magic and the Vu Qube, it takes a couple of minutes max to acquire the signal, to fine-tune where the antenna is pointed. Even with the $300 crank-up, which may overall be the best compromise between cost and functionality, it's still expensive, but not too bad.
The Slingbox is an alternative that works with either satellite or cable (or a DVR or most any A/V source). The biggest downside, at least out here on the road is, you really do need a good, stable broadband Internet connection in your vehicle. OK, here's the thing about Internet out here. You really need a minimum of 700k Internet speed in order to stream (download) a TV signal at high quality. Quality takes a hit at 500k, and at 384 down to 256 it's a very smudged quality.
In areas where you can get cell phone broadband, most mobile broadband services will give you the necessary speed for high quality Slingbox TV viewing (most cell phone broadband packages are in the $60 per month range, tho, so it is a monthly cost to factor in). And check your cell carrier's Terms of Service very carefully before streaming video with it, as most expressly forbid video streaming, file sharing, Webcams, downloading extremely large files (CD's, DVD's and TV shows and movies from Usenet) and other bandwidth-hogging, continuous-use activities. (In other words, they expressly forbid exactly what I want to use the Internet for
).
At the truck stops your Internet connection can vary wildly, from really bad sputtering to mediocre 256k and 384k, to decent 500k and on up. All truck stop Internet plans have MB bandwidth limits on daily or monthly downloads. With a monthly subscription at the Flying J, for example, you are limited to a total of 15GB of combined upload and download data (most others have lower limits). At 500k, streaming video will represent about 250 MB of combined up and down data in an hour. About 4 hours for a gig, which means for your 15GM monthly allotment you can watch perhaps as much as 60 hours of Slingbox TV. That's a lot. Two hours a day. Assuming you don't use any other Internet, tho. And sometimes the speed will be faster, higher quality TV, but that means less hours per month. Most cell carriers limit you to about 5gigs per month before they start throttling your speed down to 200k or less.
Which method of TV in the vehicle you go with depends on what you want. If you only have cable at home, no satellite, then a Slingbox may be the way to go, depending on how reliable and fast your Internet connection is out on the road. If you have satellite at home, though, then the cost of a crank-up dish plus an extra $5 a month will quickly become less than the cost of a Slingbox plus an extra $60 per month for Aircard internet service. Then again, if you
already have an Aircard and are already paying that fee, adding a Slingbox becomes pretty cheap.
I'll probably go with the $300 crank-up. I'd like to have a smaller dome or a Vu Que, but I'm having a hard time justifying the additional $500 or so. The Vu Qube, having only a single coax connection and not requiring a power connection tips the scales somewhat, as that makes it extremely portable and can easily be moved to another vehicle (which is one of the things it was designed for). But it's still $700. Hafta think on that one a bit more. It's only 17" high and 16" wide, though, which is half the operating space of the crank-up dish. I have a headache.
Slow and steady, even in expediting, wins the race - Aesop
