FTA satellite reciever

I decided that after spending about 3+ days trying to set this piece of shit up and at the end not being able to watch more that 3 channels because the satellites don't seem to want to show themselves so that I may "lock into them", that I'll make a post about how easy everything else about setting it up is. Locking to the satellite is frustratingly stupid and I don't want to have to move a dish to lock into a satellite ever again.

First up, the receiver:
just like any other satellite receiver. A box that you connect to the cable coming from the dish antenna to and the TV to watch whatever programming from whichever satellite you want to get said programming.
You can find updates for the software of the receiver in many sites but the one I thought were more useful(or maybe the only ones that were on the top of a google search) were: http://ftafuture.org/ & http://currentbins.com/

Second, the dish antenna:
there are 2 types of antenna, those used to recieve C-band and those used to recieve Ku-band.(frequency and other technical stuff)
The HUGE dishes that were more widely used some years ago(10+ years?)are used to recieve C-band signals. These use lower frequency and fare better on bad weather.
The smaller dishes that very common nowadays receive Ku-band. These are easier to move, but since they use higher frequencies that the C-band dishes they don't fare as well on harsh climate.(apparently it's more related to the frequency used and not he size of the dish)
Also, apparently after the 2 year contract with dish and directtv the dish antenna is yours so if you were a subscriber for more than 2 years you could use that antenna to receive FTA programming if you happen to decide to drop out of their services.

Third, the Satellite:
I found plenty of info on the satellites used for receiving programming but the only one that I could find in practice were the DishNetwork ones which don't transmit any FTA programming (other than ion, some channel telling you that using FTA receivers is bad, nasa and some channels that apparently tell the subscriber that he'll be able to watch the WFC championship on payperview next weekend... oh and religious channels) anyways here are the most useful sites that I could find for finding whatever satellite you'd want to ... find :
http://www.lyngsat.com/ (the most important site for anything FTA aparently)
http://www.satbeams.com/footprints/ (helps you find which satellites are beaming their info to your region)
http://www.dishpointer.com/ (extremely useful for finding the direction and elevation of the satellites)

On a side note, I found that you could use google earth and the dishpointer site to find the direction of the satellite in google earth, and I thought it was pretty neat so... just saying.