I've been hacking cable/sat for a few years. I started back in the day with the H and HU cards on DTV and when they came out with the p4 card, went with FTA.
Started with a Pansat and went to a Viewsat Extremem, much better Programming Guide and faster channel changing.
For you homies who want to give a try, do this. Call up DN and get one of their packages, the starting package is like 36 bones a month and free installation, you can cancel after a few months.
This way you have a professional installation done and don't have to worry about running cables or pointing the dish. I have two rooms setup with one FTA box and one DN HD Box. Because there will be times when the send a signal through the stream and your FTA box can be down for days or even weeks at a time before the coders come out with a fix, just like in the Directv days, with all that freezing shit.