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Beverly Friddle
The Wally is a satellite television receiver for Dish Network. It is the middle-man between the satellite antenna (the dish) and your television. It takes the signal received from the dish and makes it into the picture you see on the TV screen. That is its most basic function, but modern receivers often do much more. These duties can include providing on-demand content, DVR management, and a platform for other online, streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and others.
In addition to the WiFi adapter, Dish offers Bluetooth and over-the-air (OTA) adapters. The Bluetooth adapter allows the user to listen to the audio output through a Bluetooth headset (your TV may offer this functionality built-in as mine does). The OTA adapter allows you to hook your OTA antenna (like a bat-wing rooftop antenna) into the receiver and it will incorporate those channels into the guide. All the adapters are connected via USB to the back of the receiver. The Wally has two USB ports, so not all adapters can be used at one time. If the optional DVR service is used, it will occupy one of the two USB ports.
The Wally has identical connections as the VIP 211Z. These consist of the powered coaxial input coming from the satellite dish antenna, an ethernet connection, an HDMI output to run to your HD television, RCA SD video output, two USB ports and the 120VAC power adapter.
Overall, the guide is snappy, picture looks great, and it has needed (or performed on its own) ZERO reboots. This is one of those rare times when a product lived up to, and outperformed, my expectations.
Initially, it was reported that the Wally had an issue passing its check switch unless it could see all three satellites. Its predecessors would allow the user to select the option to watch TV with a limited channel lineup if it could not connect with all satellites. While I have not been in a position to try this, word is that an update did fix this bug. I can report that my unit did do a lengthy software update during activation, so there have been changes made since launch. *UPDATE: I have now used the Wally in a situation where I could only get reception from two of the three satellites and it worked perfectly, albeit with a limited channel lineup.
There were also reports that users had issues with the activation process hanging up if they tried to activate it using a mobile antenna (like what I have). I did not have this issue whatsoever. Would it have been faster on an actual mast-mounted dish? Maybe, but I have no complaints. I would estimate that it was 40 minutes from the time I opened the box until I was watching TV. Certainly if you do have issues activating this, or any other receiver, definitely try to locate an actual Dish Network dish and try again. Camping World is a good spot to do this since they have a demo unit inside the store that is run to a dish on the roof. Simply unplug their receiver and plug in yours. I activated my VIP 211Z right in the aisle of a CW when I was a new Dish customer.
Thank you for the great review. I have a question regarding dry camping. With a mobile antenna and the Wally does everything have to go through a complete alignment each time you power up to use it or does it remember everything from the last time it was powered up? How long does it take to power up? Thank you for all your help
Received my DishTailgater, Wally, and 1tb external hard drive today for our motorhome. I set the Tailgater outside and hooked up the supplied coax to it. Went inside and hooked up the other end of the coax to the Wally. Plugged in the supplied HDMI cable to the Wally and to our Samsung LED TV. Turned on the TV. Plugged in the Wally. The Wally went through about 10 minutes of automatic startup including the Tailgater automatically acquiring the satellites. Everything worked great and was easy to install. Called DishNetwork to activate the Wally receiver, adding it to my home DishNetwork account for $7.00/month, and all went smoothly and all my home channels including my locals(my motorhome is currently setup only a couple miles from my home) came up on the Wally guide with no issues. Then I plugged in my new 1tb external hard drive to the Wally and had the DishNetwork agent activate DVR capability to it(for a one-time $40.00 charge). After letting the Wally automatically reformat the external hard drive for the Wally, the DishNetwork agent had me re-boot the Wally and it all came up automatically and the DVR capability all worked great. Working in the hardware/software technology field for 37+ years, it absolutely amazed me how easy and painless this installation took. All done in less than 80 minutes! So glad I found your original blog post. It was very helpful. I appreciate it.
Bob, Just curious how your Wally and Tailgater worked out. Any issues of words of wisdom? I just ordered for my motorhome a Wally and a Tailgater, and a 1TB external harddrive since we DVR a lot, and I order the OTA(over-the-air adapter) also so that my motorhome external antenna will be able to feed any available over the air local channels directly into the Wally and the Wally guide(and be able to DVR those local channels). I am hoping this all works seamlessly..
I bought wally to replace my 211Z. I bought into the great reviews. What no one bothered mentioning was that the Wally require ALL 3 Satellites to be found or you get NO programs. My 211Z would often miss a satellite but still let me get programming from ones it found. For me this makes the Wally as good as NO receiver at all.
We upgraded to the Wallys last year after a power glitch toasted both our VIP 211K receivers. Because we had the K receivers, we were able to also connect our OTA antenna through the receivers. With the Wally, we had to get the adapters, and they work well, except, we are not able to delete the channels from the Guide when we change locations in our RV. Any suggestions how to do this? I have tried to delete all the OTA channels, and they just still show on the Guide.
Ryan, we are thinking about changing from the 211v to the Wally. Some parks have decent WiFi some not, do you know if the hotspot from an iPhone will work for WiFi to view Netflix, or not because of constant buffering? Thanks for your insightful article. Susan
I have the WiFi adapter connected to my Wally using my iPhone hotspot
it buffers a lot very annoying
but when I use the dish everywhere app on my iPhone
Connect directly to to tv using a lightning to hdmi adapter that that you can get from Apple it hardly buffers at all
Bonus it mirrors everything on your iphone screen to your tv
I put a splitter on my HDMI wall y outlet. One HDMI cable to front tv and another long HDMI cable to bedroom tv. Works good. Now if I could find a wireless HDMI transmitter and receiver that worked through walls i could get rid of the long cable
Hi David! I have the dedicated HDMI running directly to my main TV. The RCA is running into the hub (my hub has RCA inputs for satellite). Therefore, I only get HD picture from Dish on my main television. You could always use your DVD input on the hub for the Wally if the satellite only has a coax input. Thanks for reading!
I recently bought a Samsung UHD TV Smart TV and am using Yamaha receiver with 5.1 surround.
I had to install the optical cable from TV to Yamaha receiver and then set your receiver to
Audio-1 so you can then hear Netflix ! Good Luck
I cannot get any sound through my receiver when using netflix app from my samsung un55f6300. I am using ARC HDMI input and I tried an optical cable to the receiver. Do I need to change any settings on the tv, app or stereo? If anyone can help let me know. My receiver is a denon X400
Great article Eric, I learned a lot, and it was very clear. Method 2 works for me, but I tried method 4 with the ARC capability (tv, receiver, and hdmi cable have the capability), I activated ARC on both the tv and the receiver through the set up menus, kept my receiver on the hdmi channel, and it does not work: I still get the sound from the directv, with the image of the tv app (Netflix, YouTube, etc.) I have no idea why this does not work ?
Also, for other components (cable box, media player and blu ray player), I have a conventional setup where the components are connected to the receiver via HDMI and one HDMI cable goes from the receiver to the video in of the TV. This works well and I want to keep it the same way while being able to do the items above (Netflix and Chromecase on surround sound).
Eric, Is there any problem in using both an HDMI and a digital optical cable to get sound? How does the TV know which cable to use as sound? it seems it is the only way to get sound from my smart TV Apps and my Satellite TV to work on my surround sound. Both are wanting to use the ARC input on the receiver but I only have one ARC input on my receiver. I have a Samsung 7150 smart TV.
My new Samsung Smart TV is connected via HDMI/ARC to my AV Pioneer receiver. The TV can turn ON/OFF the receiver, and the TV can steer the receivers volume.
Problem is, that after turning both products off via the TV remote control, the receiver is turned on by itself the next day!
How is that possible?
Very helpful article. My TV has the HDMI/Arc input which I have connected from TV to cable box. I have digital optical from receiver to cable box. What do I need to do to get sound out of my surround system for the Smart apps. Little confused here.
Thanks alot for the info its simple n straight forward helped me save the hassle of connecting optical cable unnessarily to my first home theatre system denon awr-2200 and tannoy tfx 5.1 + uhd48 samsung tv..
I bought new lg tv version 55uh850t in jan 17. And i have bose home theatre 520 soundtouch system. Now the problem is when i share any video to my tv the sound does not come from my home theatre but when i switch to internal speaker of tv then sound is coming from tv. I have already connected a hdmi cable from tv(arc) to home theatre. But when i am using optical cable then sound is coming through my home theatre. This is the problem with only mobile sharing video to tv. Not with other connection. All are working fine. Pls give me a solution.
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