What can I learn from, or make with, a Direct TV receiver?

They make excellent doorstops. Also, they can be used as bookends, and even paperweights.

If you are into that sort of thing, you can cut off the power cords and ask your significant other to flaggelate you for dragging home useless junk.

PlainBill

A few dollars by selling it on Ebay, if it works.

DirecTV will NOT provision a receiver that purchased in this manner. There's no reason they can't do it, but in order to prevent a people from going into business selling stolen receivers, they demand that all such receivers be returned to DirecTV. If you ask, they'll send you a mailing box.

There's not much you're going to learn from the box. However, if you get a dish, LNB, some coax, and spend some time getting it setup, you'll be able to watch some promo and test channels without purchasing service.

Transistors.resistors,capacitors, transformer,,all good for scrounging,, keep the board and throw/sell the metal Explore the chips that are on the board, data sheets can be interesting,,,pick out the voltage regulator transistors,,7805 etc, good practice,,for learning, What is the name of this group again? Joe in Texas

Small switchmode power supply, and a lot of proprietary parts. Have you even looked inside one of them?

sci.electronics.REPAIR Not hacking, prototyping or junk collecting.

Do you have the dish? If so... a wok.

Get a real news server and you won't see most or any of that 'Google Groups' posted spam.