The one thing I'm concerned about with DirecTV is rain fade.

"Rain Fade" is a misnomer.

The more accurate term would be "Gigantic booming thundercloud directly over your house slinging tons of hail and lightning into your yard fade".

In other words, when I had DirecTV, only the harshest of high-energy thunderstorms would block my signal, and only briefly. This is going to depend on how well your dish is aimed and whether you're too far off-axis from one of their more focused target areas (supposedly they boost the satellite power towards the more rany areas, I have no idea how).

The total amount of time that I lost signal due to weather was approximately 1/100th the amount of time that I lost signal due to cable company problems. (I switched to DirectTV one 4-day Thanksgiving weekend when the cable went out Wednesday night and stayed out all the way through Sunday. And they did not answer their phones that weekend, which is actually illegal according to FCC rules. Owner went home late on Wednesday and forgot to press the "forward" button on the phone...)

Basically, I will do my best to avoid giving cable companies any more of my money if I can help it. So yeah, the DirecTivo thing would be good for you if you can handle some data compression artifacts in your TV picture.

Your only concern is whether or not the aparment complex will allow you to install the dish. I don't know where the laws currently reside on that subject, as I've had my own home since DirecTV has been available. But once upon a time, your apartment manager had every right to disallow you from mounting the dishes on the apartment building, and I don't see why that would have changed in recent years.