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TV at Tailgate?

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dubs21

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Looking to add TV capabilities to the tailgate. Those of you that already have tv at your tailgate, what are you using? Directv/Dish satellite, appleTV, chromecast, slingbox, HD OTA antenna? I'm guessing a generator is required, don't really want to run anything off the car battery the whole time we're out there. I don't know anything about generators, what size am I looking at? TV stand and mounting options?

Thanks for the feedback.

And if this is covered in another thread, hit me a link.
 
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Don't bother with a generator. Technically they're not allowed and you've got to spend big $$ to get one that isn't loud/droning. I'd rather run a couple marine batteries in parallel with a big DC/AC converter. Then, just recharge the batteries between games. If you were to run it off your actual car battery, you'd definitely want to crank it up every little while to make sure it doesn't get too drained.
 
Ehh...depends on what you want to run. Figure out the power usage of everything you want to run, how long you want to run it, work in a safety margin and then buy the batteries. It's just math at the core. I don't know enough off the top of my head to hazard a guess.
 
Tailgater: http://www.dish.com/technology/tv-outdoors/

Dish has options where you can put their service into "hibernation" so that you aren't paying the full price year round (parents do this at lake and beach properties). I know people who have the tailgater and those who just have a regular dish. Both seem like pretty good options. I haven't explored using any dongle or roku/apple tv device to stream and am not sure how you could pick up the wifi necessary besides creating a hotspot.

Keep us up to date with what you decide to do.
 
Advantage of the tailgater is that you only pay for the months you use it.
 
I use a marine battery as well. Connect the tv to an HD antenna. In theory, you can hook it up to your phone and stream Watch ESPN, but I can't get it to work for more than a few minutes at a time.
 
We use the car battery with an inverter, mostly because its significantly cheaper. I crank my truck for 15 minutes or so each hour just to be safe, but that's probably overkill. In the past, we've brought a backup dish we picked up off craigslist for cheap, and brought a receiver from home. You're technically supposed to call them to let them know, but we've never had any problems. A few years ago we ended up ditching bringing a tv each game. It was a hassle and people ended up congregating around the tv rather than hanging out and talking.
 
We use an Advance Auto marine battery and a Black & Decker 400 watt inverter to run a 23" LCD and an amplified antenna. We get the 4 hours we tailgate before, plus another hour or so after the game and have not had it die yet.
 
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