Hughes was the company (parent: GM) that owned the satellites. RCA had the exclusive on the consumer recievers at launch time and when that expired, other companies joined in. Hughes Network Systems released their own product and we were one of the original distributors for that, along with thier DirecPC internet product which gave way to DirecWay and now HughesNet. I loved my DirecPC back when everyone else was using 56K modems. LOL
Your issue with outages on the HD stuff could be related to a marginal installation. You can go into your setup menu and view signal strength readings for all transponders on all satellites. Any that are in the 80's and below are much more likely to drop out during heavy rain. Are your other channels more susseptible to outages now that you went to HD? The whole dish gets replaced to you're starting from scratch as far as dish alignment goes.
Yes they are. We have two receivers that are HD, and two which are not. They all go down at the same time. We do have a new dish with (I think) 3 LNBs, and yes some of my transponders have less than 80. Time for a realignment?
We have a major tree problem, so it's mounted on a fireplace with a 10/12 pitch on the roof (two story). Not user friendly.