DishPointer Augmented Reality App Reviews

Very usefull for camping / caravaning. Thx for the iPhone 4 GPS / retina display update.

It can give you a rough idea but as soon as it is near the dish all of the satellites are out by miles. There are other apps that are cheaper and do the same thing

This is not a review. A question about "how to use this pointer"?

seems rather useless for a 3G phone. Not sure what i was expecting, but $9.99 for the 3G seems wrong. Perhaps a $.99 for 3G usage and $9.99 for 3GS.

great program if u an trying to determine a place to set up a dish with a rotor so you "pretty much know" that you will be able to have clear line of sight to all the birds your after. needs more tweaking like tap the bird you are Aimed at to get its name and provider even channel lists would be handy. or choose a FTA mode to remove the pure subscription birds. but all and all not a bad app

Not the best accuracy that I expected. Voice interaction would be very helpful as you maybe 100 feet in the air !

Very untrustworthy. Ive been doing satellite for over 4 years now.. When i am looking for satellite 101 this app has it in the complete opposite sky majority of the time. Very unreliable. If I have it connected to wifi then it will lock in the sky very accurately. Something must be fixed for us field techs to maximize our assets

App works for the most part, but has distressing tendency to give a somewhat different location in the sky, for the same satellite, every time I use it. I guess its okay to get a rough idea of where a satellite is, but its no good for anything approaching precision aiming.

This app is not worth the money. It needs to upgrade to the ability to select which satellite you wish to locate in an options menu and then locate it with the camera. The camera would be beneficial if it was live when searching for the satellite in question but the ability to take a picture and locate the satellite you wish to find is acceptable. Still it needs to be updated to inform you where the satellite is located.

This should be part of the DP azimuth app. The camera should display the cross hairs and elevation over a live image. Clever idea. Needs work.

Not like the ad. Improvements that need to be done. Scale moves to fast to pin point sat. Needs to have a way input the location of the sat you want to find. Pic and elevation does not show together like ad shows. bottom line: dont purchase until improvement are fixed.

It dose not work at all.

I have this vesion and the pro version. (Note the pictures which are showing currently are from the old version, this new version blows it away!) Just point your iPhone 3GS to the sky and instantly see where the satellites are in the sky. Know instantly if you have good line of sight to the satellites. This program is a must for any professional installer. This will save installers lots of time trying to figure out where to put the dish for the best line of sight.

Please ignore the reviews for the earlier version, particularly my own harsh review which, I hope, will be gone by now. This version 2 is actually a completely new application with nothing in common with the original. The developer apparently only submitted this new app in the slot for the earlier app as a way to give it to those of us who had bought the original. The earlier effort was worthy of the one or two stars it got. The new app is a revolution. This app will eliminate a major continuing frustration in the life of RVers who must locate satellites every time they move. For the first time, its easy to find a spot to park an RV where reception is not just promised, but actually possible. Hold the phone up and spin around until you see the satellites you need. If something is in the way, move to a different site. When nothing is in the way, youre done. Simple. My wife and I not only need to lock onto TV satellites, but Internet. We hold our breath every time we raise the Internet dish; the dishs reliability is well short of 100%. For the first time, there is no question about a problem being HugesNet or just where were parked. One of the first things I tried the app on was my roof installation at home: I found our trees are now within six feet of occluding satellite 110. That gives me more than a year to get around to either getting them topped or moving the dishes to a different part of the roof. (It took around 30 seconds of hopping around the roof to find a perfect new spot, one the original installer missed.) DishPointer AR works best on iPhone 3G S phones because of their built-in compass. It can be used on the older phones with a manual compass, but you have to set the direction using a manual compass or a known satellite bearing. If youve been looking for an excuse to upgrade to the 3G S, you no longer need an excuse: If you have an RV and must repeatedly struggle siting and aiming a satellite dish, this app is worth the price of the app plus the price of the phone. Where was this eight years ago when we first started our journey? Note to the suspicious: I dont normally write rave reviews. In fact, I originally gave the first, non-AR version of this same application a single star. I personally have never seen an app improve so much between releases, but thats because the developer went back to the drawing board and started over. The app needed it, and the results are stunning. Update: Helpful hints: 1) Wear a billed cap, like a baseball cap, when searching for a site during the heat of the day. Not only are the satellites to the south, so is the sun. (Yes, I know your mom told you not to look directly into the sun, but she never had to find satellite 110 through a hole in the trees.) 2) How to take a picture of your site survey, including the satellites in the picture: Press the power button (on top of the phone) and the home button (toward the bottom front of the phone) at the same time. Yes, its inconvenient, particularly since the power button is just above the camera lens, but Apple has yet to give developers a way to capture augmented-reality screens any other way. Blame Apple, not the developers.

Some reviewers clearly didnt read the full description before buying or using this app. The 3G (& earlier) does not have an integrated compass. If youre trying to use this app on that platform (as I was), you will need to manually enter your bearings (using a magnetic compass or some other point of reference), and you will only get an accurate reading tilting the phone along one axis (you can look up & down, but not left to right). To be sure, these are significant limitations, especially for a premium-priced app (a hard pill to swallow given that I, like most purchasers of the non-pro version, really only expect to use it one time). Nonetheless, it serves a unique function and saved me a tremendous amount of money, time, & heartache (no DirecTV for us), so I have to give props where theyre due. While I cant fault the developers for the compass issue, I do have one significant beef with the softwares design: it does not work in landscape mode. For those of us who cant pan left to right, some extra horizontal real estate would be much appreciated. (a suggestion to the developers for future editions: for the compass-impaired, itd be great if we could do this: 1) using the built-in maps, user selects a moderately distant visual point of reference - lets say a tall building which is visible on satellite photos. 2) app calculates bearings from current location to that point. 3) in the camera AR view, a vertical line is drawn representing that bearing; as long as the user manually lines up that axis with the landmark, they should have a reasonably accurate compass bearing. 4) User can drag the line left or right to fine-tune their bearings (as long as the user keeps that line on the landmark, the satellites will follow). 5) user can select another reference visible from the ground - say, a tree or mailbox post - which may be more convenient or allow a coarser compass adjustment (move your building to the right of the screen, select a post at the left, then drag that all the way to the right). Obviously, your bearings would become less accurate with each iteration, but this would still be a handy tool in a pinch.)

While I still do not find this app useful and would recommend to anyone thinking of buying it to read carefully all descriptions and uses, I do want to say that the developer has been most kind to me and took care of me, as has Apple. Thank you both and I will be more scrutinizing in future purchases from the app store. Thank you Alan you are a gentleman.

The best tool for sat instalers anywhere if you have the 3GS. I tell every installer I meet to get this timesaving tool that makes choosing your dish placement a breeze. The one function missing is ability to snap a pic in camera mode, that would be BIG!!! AL

Its too inaccurate to point anything with, and there are no refunds... I still had to use my old pointer.

Ive had this app for a year now and use it every time I do a survey. Its is tremendous help! Im also a satellite engineer and use it all the time! It is truly a magnificent thing to have. Absolutely love it!

It saved me a $100 service call. A tree had apparently grown up in the line of sight of our HD-specific satellite. I would have never thought that this paticular tree was the issue. The tree was far to the right and the satellite did not appear to be "pointed" towards it, but after cutting the tree, we now we have our channels back. Our HD is back just in time for football season... Great app!