We had DirecTV, and we now have Dish Network.. we had no major problems with either in terms of reception, the weather has to be REALLY bad for the signal to go out, and if it does, it's usually just for a few minutes. We've had our dishes knocked out of alignment by hail on both networks though.. but I don't think that's particularly common unless you live in an area prone to severe thunderstorms with very large hail (aka tornado alley)

The reason we left DirecTV is that they refused to offer us any kind of deal on upgrading to HD, and we had been customers at that point for 4 years. They wanted to charge us $299 per receiver (we needed two).. so we switched to Dish and got two HD DVR's and installation for FREE... and for the past 2 years, DirecTV has sent us offers every two weeks or so offering exactly what they said was not possible before we switched

I have to say that I prefer the DVR that Dish offers to Tivo (which is what DirecTV uses). We also pay slightly less for our service, including the extra fees for HD, than we had been paying for DirecTV without HD.

We can't get AT&T's U-Verse where we are (they don't provide phone service here) but I think if we could, I'd probably prefer that - I like the idea of having one central DVR and the ability to watch those programs in different rooms. With Dish you can do it with 2 rooms, since each receiver can be "shared" with another if you want.

We can't get traditional cable here either...