I had a C-Band dish in Alaska, when it got too cold out the motor would stop working and one person would have to go out and manually turn the dish while there was a person in the middle shouting out the signal strength lol.
How about when there would be a bad lightning storm, and blew out the motor on your dish which happened to my uncle a couple times over the years, and I had a neighbor's dish get struck so hard it went down the line hit the decipher box, which then blew up their TV connected to the box.
my father had one 3 meter dish in germany in 90s, mounted 15 meter high (3 story building with long antenna mast on it) over a small hill. watched english simpsons before any localization existed. was THE motivation to learn english. it was movable, and could recive from geostationary satellites near the horizon. early descrambling was easy.
Mid 90's I got a second hand 1.5m dish which I had in my parents garden. It too was movable so was able to pick up both CNN & Discovery from a US satellite & European channels from several European satellites from the UK. All without any descrambling required
We had one from 1989 till we replaced it in 1996 or so we lived in the middle of nowhere. When we got internet it was like 10kb on a 54kb modem untill we moved in 2001 we did get a small dish after 96 but fed big dish was still there when we moved.
If you were an early enough adopter to satellite you could bypass the scramblers. When I was in high school my friend's dad was a journalist for the big tech magazines. They were able to tap raw signals and watch broadcasters pick their noses before they went on air, which was a favorite story of their family. They had access to every channel being broadcast, and he would watch shows that were totally unheard of in our region.
@@needfuldoer4531 I'm unsure. I'm remembering second-hand stories I was told in the late 90s and very early 2ks. I believe they could tap studio feeds at one point, from what I remember of their stories. Tales of broadcasters cursing and whatnot before they suddenly became upstanding and proper. That sort of thing.
I remember back in the 80's, at the state fair, dish sellers had a setup to demonstrate what the dishes could do. This was back in the day when the ABC Evening News was broadcast from New York, Washington and Chicago. It was pretty cool watching the broadcast and being able to see and hear the anchors and producers talking back and forth to each other during what would have been a commercial break for everybody else watching regular broadcast TV.
That reminded me of mall kiosks I'd sometimes see in some malls in Singapore where people would somehow get away with promoting (and maybe also selling) pay TV piracy boxes. The last time I saw such a kiosk was 1 or 2 years ago, though.
I can't believe the VIDEO failed to mention that users could tune in to channels from all over the world. Kudos to all the commenters sharing stories of people they knew who used their giant satellite dishes to tune in to channels from other countries!
Yes,real extreme and vivid channel on 127 west c band free,free and yes its 2022,over 200 free channels available,and yes c band still works and yes it's 2022.
No that is not right, you simply cant pick up satelites, that are not pointing at the country, where you want tuo pickup the signal, i cant pick up american satelite tv here in germany for example, , However i can for example Puck up the "Brittish Spotbeam" just fine, i get all the free channels on Astra 19,2°E ( German channels send their program on this satelite, but also Spanish stations and many more countries, hoewer i dont speak spanish ) And Astra 28,2 (UK TV , so BBC/ITV7STV Channel 4 .....) Ant these are not the only satelites that you can recive here.
I used to sell and install the big dishes back in the '80s. It was amazing how many channels you could get, back then it was common for cable TV to only supply 12 ~ 30 channels. I remember watching the Daytona 500 feed from Daytona to the network, during the commercial times the announcers would chat amongst themselves thinking they weren't on the air.
The network live feeds were great you got to see what everyone else missed when they watched the commercials and the network feeds of syndicated shows was great you could record episodes of your favorite shows sometimes 3-4 days early. You could find any sporting game raw broadcast.
Yeah we had one during the late 80's and into the 90's. I loved watching the feeds for all the NFL games and how when it went to commercial you got to listen to the announcers talking off air. What was really amazing for me as a kid was during the Gulf war and Desert Storm watching live raw video footage of the war when networks cut away the feed kept going on Satellite. I was glued to the TV.
@@steve-ph9yg Exactly! .. Brings good memories of my old man and I,.. we used to watch together for instance Star Trek:TNG early Saturday around noon, a few days before broadcast, all 5 acts, and the promos without commercials. Even though I was the Sci-Fi buff, my dad always wanted to watch it with me, and in the end got him hooked. It wasn't rare to hear him sometimes: "when's the new Star Trek? Come on, let's go, move the dish! " =)
The best part is there were no artificial restrictions on what you could watch. I could watch feeds in Canada, Mexico or any of the states without being blocked. There was also a lot of interesting 3rd party content; lots of religious stations, people that rented time to produce their own shows and the occasional nutcase prophesizing the end of the world. It was a blast.
Oh yes, the religious broadcasts were particulary hilarious, some of them. There was some guy who spent the broadcast slumped in a chair, mumbling into a microphone about... I never quite figured out what, but at the end of one of his weird interludes he'd pass it off to the house band to play some Christian rock. So many televangelists trying to convince their flock to give up their hard earned pensions so the pastor can pay for his new mansion lol.
@@leogama3422 no that would be Nintendo's claim to fame. Very close to the internet before internet but internet has been around as an overall concept and technology since I want to say like the 40 to the 50 although I could be wrong about that as we know it today it's only been around since roughly 96 ish don't quote me on the years. You should look up Nintendo satellivision not only is it internet technically but it was the true first online gaming.. ain't that some shit
After getting married in 1993, and having cable for 6 months, we purchased the large dish. My equipment had the ability to handle all the sat's, you could manually adjust tracking, and it would even turn the dish and turn on your VCR to record the shows. I absolutely loved the big dish and really miss it. I could buy my channels a la carte, so I didn't have 50 channels I never watched. I only paid about $3,500 for my dish and receiver. Unfortunately, the packages kept going up in price and eventually it just didn't make sense anymore. Also, anytime you had snow or a strong wind, it would put the dish slightly out of balance and then your channels didn't display so the VCR just tapped garbage. Unless you were home to fine tune it, it was worthless. The company that did the adjustments wanted $60 every time to align it. That was in 1993-03. Just didn't make $$ sense. The best part was taping and watching shows a few days in advance. A wednesday show would get beemed down on Monday. That killer Thursday lineup of ER, NYPD Blue, Friends and whatever still beemed down on Thursday, but in the afternoon. So we could sit down and watch them, commercial free, at 6pm and be done before they even aired on local tv.
My dad bought a big motorised satellite dish in the 90s, and sourced a decoder card with a telephone line so that it could update itself. Had +1000 channels growing up 😂 It was kinda awesome hearing that dish move around when you went from one satellite to the next.
My grandfather did the same thing in the 80's and 90's. I remember people calling all the time for the updated codes and whatnot. Then went to burning the cards for dish network and jailbreaking firesticks etc. There will always be a way around paying the man for tv.
I had one of these on a trailer in front of my house. I lived along a busy road and I let a local satellite tv dealer park it there for advertisement in exchange for free tv. The receiver had the "dealer chip" for the Videocypher II decoder so I had access to all channels. The west coast satellites were too low on my horizon due to trees, so I couldn't get a few of the premium channels. Different channels were on different satellites. For every system sold off that advertising I got to keep the trailer another week. Fun times. With that dealer chip I could even catch uplink feeds so I often caught Star Trek Next Generation episodes a few days before their air date.
These dishes were popular in the 80s. I should know I helped install them. The ones I hated the most were the early fiberglass ones with a steel inside to it. What killed them was the scrambling then encryption that came along. Prime Star then Dish did their share to end the big dish.
My father had one back in late 90s. We moved to a rather remote location so it was the only option to watch TV. One quirk with it was that it would only pick few channels, and if you want to view other set of channels, you have to physically point to dish to another satellite. So we will watch a set of channels for a month or so before switching to another set of channels.
So your family stayed on the satellite for a month.🤷♂️ I was moving satellites all the time every day. my username is my way of remembering the 4dtv receiver.
We would often move our dish a few times a day, got really good about knowing where those satellites were in the sky just off the horizon. More than once I recall hitting the dish with a football or basketball. Fortunately we had it mounted well enough we didn't loose the signal, but it did mean playing with the Skew and minute settings now and then.
What was cool was that you could watch the continuous satellite feed and see people on news sets or sporting events doing things or playing before going live on the air or during commercial breaks. There was once a news anchorwoman who was waiting to go live and ordered something from a magazine using her old school cell phone. She was on camera giving her credit card number and expiration date over the airwaves. I wonder how many hits it got?
@@jomarcentermjm back then you were not watching satellite through a network, you were watching the actual feed that was going to the network. It's like when you are at an actual sporting event. You still see what's going on in the stadium while the network is playing commercials. Before the crew went live the sound and broadcast engineers were working on the satellite signal.
Didn't realize those were already obsolete when I was a kid. I remember some people still having them in my area in the 90s & don't really ever remember hearing about modern satellite TV services for the first time until sometime close to 2000.
put the first one in 1992 by then most of the good stuff was gone over the big dish and they also fixes the new 12GHz one's to about 26in with many more ch
@@JC-Utopic-Gauntlet That lasted quite long, I grew up in our beach resort and the metallic parts of our fences & gates don't last 2~3 years'ish?(didnt really take not I was a kid back then) even with thick paint.
we lived out in the country and the house is 600ft away from the road, so getting cable run all the way back there was quoted at several thousand dollars. So the parents opted for the satellite dish instead. We had that exact same video decipher they showed in this video. I remember the first day we got it installed...first thing we watched was Turkey TV on Nickelodeon. You eventually learn the name of all the satellites and which number on the finder they associated with. 24 channels per satellite. Galaxy 1, Galaxy 2, Satcom 4 etc etc. There even was a special TV guide you could subscribe to. It was as thick as most monthly magazines and was nothing but channel guides. No fancy articles there.
I remember the magazines and remember looking for obscure satellites and transponders. Especially anything that could be showing Asian TV channels when they were still analog.
My grandparents lived out in rural Montana and had one of those big satellite dishes in the 90s. They showed me how to use it and I was able to watch west coast baseball games broadcast on channels in Los Angeles and San Francisco. I was also able to find channels from Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Mexico with it.
My sister and her husband bought a huge satellite dish (like 3 meters wide) back in 1987. I remember being amazed at all the channels - something like 500 or 1000 - from all over the world and all of it was free at the time.
We never got that many on ours, I think 20-30 channels at most. I wonder if our location (Finland) was the cause, or the type of satelite dish, it was a fixed installation so only one satelite really. I did get to watch sci-fi channel in the late 90s when it showed so much interesting stuff. The discovery channel in the mid to late 90s was also fantastic. Today both are just pure crap....
My grandfather had a dish that was like 20 ft across in the 90s. As older kids we would tell our younger kid relatives it was because he was still a secret agent. In reality he was a huge Raiders fan, in an out of market area, in a very rural location that never ran cable lines. He got every channel though it was awesome.
@@Look_What_I_Did our cable company had a fiberglass 20 ft dish..late 1990s they offered it to me for free...buy it was connected to 4 barrels of concrete so I said no.....
@@Look_What_I_Did That's incorrect I know for a fact because I grew up in a household with my grandfather who had a 14 ft dish. Also does everybody in here realize that diameter is different from circumference or did you guys not take math?
When I was married to my first wife, we almost bought one. They were hugely popular. You're right. Bazillion channels for free. Her brother worked for a satellite company and he talked us into getting one. It was really expensive and we were going to sign a contract and he would install it for a really low price. Then, the bottom fell out of that market the day before we were going to sign up. That was close. Literally, the very next day, the day we were going to sign up, no one wanted one and he was out of a job a week later.
As a chines Indonesiaan, my parents had 4m wide parabolic antena for taping chinese tv channel satelote back in 90s and early 2000. The motor system was still analog, and somewhat noisy. When I had to moved the antena, it felt like I was nasa scientist moving antena for Hubble (like in Armageddon movie) 🤣🤣
I actually grew up in West Virginia, and I can attest to the fact that these things were everywhere. I liked seeing them, but sadly they've slowly been taken down entirely.
We had one of the older fiberglass ones and I remember all the way up to I think early 2000 2001 maybe we broke out the old equipment and tried it out just to see if it still work and there was still satellites that broadcasted and you could still pick it up I think it like C-SPAN but it was something that we had did for a long time and was shocked that it still did work it's gone now I think the post is still in the ground as a reminder
I remember my family getting one when I was younger. We moved from the city to an area where the TV signals were weak. My step-father bought a descramber and got everything. Was I liked about it is that we were able to see shows three hours earlier by watching east coast on the east coast schedule being on the west coast.
I heard a story where HBO took a satellite user to court over watching for free, the lawyer for the guy said "You don't want my client to see your signal, then get it off his property" and the judge agreed and threw the case out. Shortly after that is when they started encrypting the signal and decrypting a signal not meant for you is a crime so they at least had the law on their side after that.
It's not against the law to decrypt signals. It is against the law to intercept and disseminate government signals. HBO eventually was able to charge people with simple theft up to grand larceny depending on how long they had it for free. Think about it though. If I have a rogue encrypted signal attempting to access my hardware, I have every right to decrypt, destroy, and counterattack whoever is doing it, even the alphabet agencies. And trust me, if I was able to turn prism back on it's makers, I'd be sitting in a data center somewhere being catered to instead of fixing everyone's old computers and legacy POS networks. Point of Sale, not Piece of Excrement.
@@sublimationman I know there was something that the episode was based on... but after a quick perusal of HBO's corporate history in the 70s and 80s, I don't think it was HBO that we are thinking of... >.> but for the life of me I can't figure it out.
My grandma actually had one that functioned in the 90's I remember her changing the channel and watching the progress bar move as the dish repositioned
My grandmother's functioned until the early 2000's when it got struck by lighting, then she had to find a satellite provider. I miss not worming about losing the tv at her place when it rains or is too cloudy (the signal where she lives sucks to the point she needs her land line).
"Hundreds of free TV channels from satellite" is still kinda true in Europe and other regions. Although most of them are either international news channels like BBC World or CNN International (although every half-big country has their own), or junk channels like TV shopping or religious evangelism. In some countries you get more or less the same channels as on terrestrial unencrypted, but these are usually broadcast in a narrow beam so they are nearly impossible to receive outside said country. In some other countries a similar offer is encrypted, but you can get a descrambler card for free or very cheap - as another way of region-locking those signals. A notable exception is Germany, who broadcasts 100+ channels of regular TV receivable pretty much all over Europe, unencrypted - including local versions of some that are paid pretty much everywhere else. Tuning into German satellite TV is a nice lifehack to watch some sporting events for free, if you can live with German commentary. All of these are Ku-band, though, so no need for huge dishes.
Germany is so big (in European terms) that the TV broadcasters just buy the transmission rights for the whole Europe because shipping a decoder module to every German is more expensive...
@@schnitzelsemmel technically they can't buy the rights to the whole European continent as that would eventually bankrupt German broadcasters. In fact, during the 2002 World Cup, a Spanish pay-TV broadcaster threatened to sue German public broadcasters because their signal was reaching Spain unscrambled and no German broadcaster had the rights for that tournament in the Spanish market.
I remember watching a wild feed of The Today Show. While Al Roker was interviewing Garth Brooks, Garth was telling a story about his kids. When they went to commercial, Al started telling Garth about something his own kid did, but it was obvious Garth could not care less about it. He was looking around, and even walked away and started a conversation with someone else nearby. It definitely solidified my suspicions about Garth, and I actually felt kinda bad for Al.
Yeah those satellite feeds showed a lot of stuff that wasn't intended for on-air presentation. Some of the TV personalities came out looking not so hot.
I remembered when I was very young, we took a long drive to see family. They had one of those massive satellite dishes. So every time I see one I always think about those happy times we got to visit them.
I was impressed with how many channels you could get with one of those things. Over half of those channels were in other languages but you still got everything you ever wanted. I was amazed at the time that you were getting info from outer space.
My grandparents had one of these. But they lived WAY out in the sticks, and there was nothing else available back then. Plus, hand-crank to change the satellite. I got a GOOD workout whenever we went to stay with them.
This was random and hlarious! As someone who was born in the early 80's, I remember occasionally seeing these in people's yards and I knew they were about picking up television signals, but I had no idea why people really used them. Usually when you asked, you just got the basic response that it was just for television. As time went on, I stopped wondering, but now I finally understand.
Always fun/funny to look back at technology. Actually I still saw these big dishes while working in Alaska, pointing nearly horizontal rather than up. They were so far from the satellites, that they needed these big things to pick up the signals.
My parents had one that used a metal mesh in pie cut sections for the dish itself. It was cool enough looking, that my dad used the pieces as grill inserts on a custom car he build in the early 2000s.
Yep we had that mesh one back in like 1988. Man it was cool. My mother made my step dad get rid of it when we moved in. She hated TV. It remained in the yard for years though.
I remember these dishes, though we never had one. From what I recall, some schools, institutions, and apartment complexes used them too, to run their own little private cable systems. My middle school even had one on a pole in a tiny courtyard, though I have no idea if it was still in use by the time I was a student in the mid-90s. (I think they had regular cable at an institutional rate by then.) As for scrambling... Like I said in a reply, back in the days of analog scrambling, you could buy gray-market descramblers by mail order. Magazines like _Popular Science_ and _Popular Mechanics_ here in the US always had some sellers in the classified ads in the back. Naturally, the switch to digital made these obsolete. Lots of pay-TV signals got properly encrypted instead, making them pretty impossible to crack unless someone leaked the key -- which did happen sometimes, judging by other comments. 🙂 And on a related note, many of these gray-market sellers also sold Macrovision defeat devices, which dealt with a form of copy deterrent on VHS tapes.* Basically, Macrovision messed with the signal in ways that would trip up most VCRs' tracking and gain control when recording a copy -- but that a TV wouldn't care about when viewing the original. Though not all VCRs were affected by it; older VCRs in particular weren't automatic enough, and Betamax was always impervious to it. Technology Connections has a video about Macrovision, if you want to know more: ruclips.net/video/-VqsU1VK3mU/видео.html * some DVDs have it too
Born in the mid 80's I kind of remember the tail end of these being used, but mostly the smaller dishes had already taken over by the time I got old enough. However I always thought the large dishes looked cool - specifically the black mesh ones. Honestly to this day, I still kind of wouldn't mind having one set up in my yard even just as decoration lol.
C Band just got most everything below 4 GHz chopped off to make way for "mid band" 5 G. For awhile we had C Band to ourselves, but I remember the very early days when C Band was shared with AT&T Long Lines which used C Band for point to point relay stations for long distance calls and even network TV distribution before the satellites were launched.
I'm a logger and flagger for the state of KY and in the mountains I still see these everywhere in people's yards as we find our tress along the meandering country roads. Some look almost new and I'd guess that they still use them for something like mentioned in the video. Very cool! Thanks for the info! 😃
I actually used to have one of these huge dishes in my backyard in SoCal that my brother and I used to skate in. Dad brought it home from his job that dealt with the large C-Ban dishes everyday and it was a de-commissioned dish. Was quite interesting.
I remember watching satellite tv at my uncle's house, he had a huge 2m antenna with driver motor so his son and I could select any of the satellites available and then search for interesting broadcasts. Many years later my father also purchased satellite dish, although much smaller and fixed on Astra satellite. It was still a lot of fun to have amost a hundred of programs instead of 2 available locally. I still had two dishes on my roof two years ago, when finally I decided to remove them while installing photovoltaic panels. Although I wasn't using them since ages, I got sad seeing them lying on the ground before being taken to the scrapyard... Something that once brought so much fun, innovation and feel of a better world now became so obsolete that noone would want to take it 😢
Yeah, one the big attraction of Sat dish was that in rural areas TV reception was often crappy and limited to 4-5. Having a dish was mind blowing change for rural areas, but in the late 90s came the small dish companies, which made dishes affordable to every home.
I picked one up from a local farmer in 2002, I was building a house and put it in the ceiling of the guest bedroom. We call it the Dome Room. 800 lbs of plaster and it looks awesome.
furonwarrior, I still have mine. I use it for DXing. There is still a lot of FTA (free to air) stuff out there, particularly from other countries. And as a Ham, you might be interested in using it for radio astronomy. Easy to do and most everything you need is available off the shelf. Of course it won't compete with a professional setup, but a lot of fun for the hobbyist.
I had one up until a couple of years ago. Was building an EME rig. By the time i got it up and was getting the rest of the equip, trees limbs got in the way of the LOS. couldn't cut em down, nor even trim a window through them.
We had a dish as a kid. We got 700 channels from all over the world now thats a lot. At the time it was not even fathomable. I remember the dish moving and catching the signal lol.
I remember back in the late 90s when satellite companies first started scrambling channels. It was a weapons race between them and the hackers. In the beginning, it was relatively easy to overcome the primitive encryption, with a leaked password that would last you months. But by early 2000 it was such a hassle keeping up with the newer and stronger encryption. That it had become easier to just pay the monthly subscription. By then the subscription had also fallen in price making it more appealing to most.
That wasn't when they first started scrambling - that happened about 15 years before. You're thinking of the cracking of direct-to-home digital service like DirecTV. They were encrypted from the start, but there were many security holes and there was a constant arms race between the hackers and the satellite TV companies (or, more specifically, the subcontractors like NDS and Nagravision that provided the security/encryption layer). They finally closed the last of the big security holes around 2004 when they swapped out the chip cards in subscribers' devices for a new generation of cards that were "unloopable." This was a fun time for those of us who liked free TV.
@@flapjack9495 Oh Yeah,.. The Cards 😂 Almost forgot about those. But I found a lot of the blacked out and pay per view stuff you could find broadcast in the Clear on the Ku-band satellites. Got a lot of free sports and fights back then. But,.. I didn't tell my Friends I got them for Free. Hell. I bought the satellite system. And had to spend time finding the feeds. They can supply the Beer 😂🍻👍
I have one in my backyard. 22 years ago I could change the tv channel and hear it start buzzing and watch it slowly point to a different spot in the sky. Took about a minute to change between certain channels that were far apart. When the receiver stopped working I replaced it with 77 magnetrons from old microwave ovens. Now I use it to melt my enemies from afar
Truthfully the 2.450 ghz band that microwave ovens are in are an amateur radio band and they use those magnetrons and these dishes to bounce the signal off the moon. One ham I know points his dish at the neighbors dog and night and when he barks he taps the morse code key and the dog yelps. The dog wont bark any more because every time he does he gets several megawatts of microwave energy zapping him LOL. We're gonna fix your brain with a little bit of pain... (wack) I've got a big knacker for you! Its a great song.
UK here, we got the big dish sometime in the late 80's i think, i remember being wowed by it and how it moved. I think it could pick up 2 satellites called intelsat and eutelsat or something like that. I remember sneaking down at night and watching the "foreign" channels as they had loads of nudity in them lol.
There is still stuff "in the clear" on C-Band satellite. I recommend checking out the RUclips channels Robbie Strike & Northcoaster Hobby for more information on what "in the clear" channels, & other stuff, are available on C-Band nowdays.
I remember my father picking up one of those in the late 1990s (likely for free). It was set up, but I don't think it ever did anything. As a kid I thought it made our house the coolest on the street.
Back in 91 my dads boss had a dish. My older brother and I got busted watching Eddy Murphy on HBO because our parents came back and we rushed to change the channel not realizing the dish was going to move as they walked past it.
Very funny 😂😂 At least in 1991 party lines were no longer used, so you could at least have some assurance of privacy talking to your boyfriend/girlfriend on the phone assuming the cord was long enough to reach 😄
They are still in use today to send live events from shows (Grammy’s, concerts, etc) to the network for distribution for broadcast TV or live stream online. C Band also has much better video quality than the pizza pan dishes. Think about it. You can’t fit the same 40mbps video quality per stream (frequency) on a 1/2ft dish that you can on a 10ft dish! The amount of signal strength just isn’t there. That’s why Directv and Dish Network quality looks like ass, because they compress 20 channels to one 40mbps stream so each channel only gets 2mbps (yuck). There are hobbyists that use these large dishes to view these uncompressed high quality feeds today. Why are we selling 4K and 8K TVs but broadcasting 2mbps “HD Lite” feeds? Makes no sense.
C-Band itself doesn’t reel in better quality video. After all, they’re all just digital streams. You can indeed fit a 40mbps video onto a ku band transponder that’s receivable by smaller dishes. You’re comparing broadcast quality feeds with a provider like DirecTV. Obviously the satellite provider is going to want to fit as many channels into one transponder as possible. It’s cheaper for them and the vast majority of people won’t notice the reduction in quality. Satellite feeds however are usually just one video stream on the transponder meaning it can use up all the bandwidth available on that transponder. They are often also using 4:2:2 chroma subsampling which looks better than the 4:2:0 that we see on TV. These also aren’t anywhere near “uncompressed”, they’re still very much compressed, just nowhere near as compressed as a bandwidth starved tv channel would be.
@@stephendolan3217 DirecTV and Dish use Ka Band not KU, and are grasping for bandwidth, so they jam as many channels as they can onto one 40mbps stream. Sure they "CAN" send one video stream at 40mbps, but they will run out of frequencies real fast. KU band has rain fade problems too. HBO did a rain fade test on KU band years ago, I think they got up to a 12ft KU solid dish and gave up. Still had rain fade issues. C-band is the only medium that nearly eliminates the issue (with the right equipment) and has the bandwidth capabilities. 40mbps @ 4:2:0 still blows away anything DirecTV is sending down @ their HD Lite crap. it's gross.
@@MrAlanisrox69 ah I see. Over here in Europe we pretty much exclusively use Ku band. With Sky television here over in the UK and Ireland I don’t recall ever seeing rain fade. The only times we would lose channels would be when the dish would blow out of alignment. Doing some quick Googling it looks like the technology has become so good that it has reached similar stability as C-Band Also doesn’t it not matter what band they operate in, they’re still gonna squeeze as many channels into one transponder as possible. C and Ku band have pretty much identical bandwidth right? It must be a lot worse over there because we have up to 12 channels per 50Mbps transponder and it looks very acceptable. I’ve only ever used Ka band for a few channels as it hasn’t been adopted over here much. Ireland has Ka band for the 1-2% that can’t receive its terrestrial network and from what I’ve seen, it works perfectly. They are using spot beams though. I think the bottom line is that normal people aren’t going to complain about the video quality but they would definitely complain about having a 3-metre dish in their back yard! There’s a reason why this technology has died out!
@@stephendolan3217 I guess if the power level of the satellite is high enough, rain fade could potentially be somewhat alleviated. Here in the US, on a 1.2M dish, on the strongest transponder on KU, with QPSK transmission you get about 18dB. Not sure what transmission types they use in Europe. The backhaul feeds use S2 8PSK to get higher bitrates in the smaller frequency.
@@MrAlanisrox69 we use DVB-S QPSK for SD transponders and then DVB-S2 8PSK for HD transponders. I get around 16-19db on both using a 60cm dish. Looks like they’re much higher power here
My friend's parents had a C-band dish in the 1980s. She said that she could see the raw feeds coming from the networks. Before the network evening news would start up, she could see what the anchors were doing at the news desk to prepare. Sometimes (or maybe all the time) they would swear before the TV broadcast started.
being a early 80's baby I remember our family having one and was fascinated by it, later on my Dad worked at a local TV station and they had the big descramblers that could decode anything, he used to bring home tapes of WWF and WCW wrestling to mail it to family up to a week ahead of time lol. Now I work in Radio broadcast and C band is still alive and well, in March 2022 we installed a brand new C band dish, most major talk shows like Sean Hannity, Rush, ESPN Radio, NASCAR, major sports games, Westwood One (music) as well as NPR (National Public Radio) are all still delivered on C Band with internet being the backup if all else fails.
back in the 1990s, having satellite tv and 400 channels was a flex, a status symbol. my dad had an extra large one in his backyard that was inoperable, and we did not have extra channels. now I understand why
As a Brazilian, I got most of my knowledge by watching TV and we had one of those, but it don't matches what was said, here, we had "Brasilsat" (and we still have) satellites that were free for everyone to use, no scrambling whatsoever, you only had to have the dish and the receiver and you had access to numerous national grade channels and FM stations from all around the country. Those satellites are still functioning and my cousins use them for free in 2022 (I used it from 1997 to 2012), of course, it also transmits digital channels which are free and you only needs a digital capable receiver to watch it. (Of course, there's the other satellites which transmits paid content and there's illegal receivers to break the encryption, some with two antennas or two LNB's, or one antenna and internet connection, here, they're called "Sky gato", or if you don't want dishes at all, you can go to illegal IPTV streamers which have specialized receivers for it, called "TV Box").
I'm from West Virginia and I remember seeing these large satellites everywhere. One of my neighbors had a very large one where I actually climb in the dish and used to slide off of it.
In Europe it's still common to use a satelite dish for TV. it's not as big as in the video. We only receive TV with the dish in my house. I don't have a subcription either.
Friend of mine in 89 had one in his back yard. One night lightning struck it and every single electronic device in his household either exploded, caught fire or both. This included VCR, TVs, computer, fridge, freezer, lamps, Roland keyboard and oven.
Always wanted one. When I bought my first house in 2000, I put letters in the mailboxes of homes that had ones to see if someone would sell me one. For $50, I got a great 10 foot dish the wiring, and a Drake converter box. This was how I watched TV until 2006 when the last signals up there went away. Fast forward 12 years and it turns out there are now a lot of digital channels up there. I went out and did the same thing and now our new house has a 10 footer that picks up all kinds of strange stuff from outer space. Raw feeds, stations you won't find anywhere else, and 1000's of radio feeds. It's a really cool hobby!
If you have a way to take one home, then you should drive up to the person's house, and offer to take it off their hands if they no longer want it, as you can still pickup free digital C-Band signals with correct descrambler box.
Born and raised in WV and I remember seeing these everywhere growing up. I drove past one a few days ago and thought, "I wonder what those are/were for because there's no way they're still in use." Good timing on the video!
My grandparents who lived in a rural mountainous section of the north western US had one of these old dishes but by the early 90s it wasn't even upright anymore they were using it as a flower bed.
My neighbor installed one in the mid-80s, and he was so proud of all the channels he could get. His TV guide was the size of a magazine. "I can get all kinds of TV - Russian TV, Chinese TV, Europe, everywhere! I can get all the cable and movie channels too!" I glances over his kids glued to their TV - they were watching "Love Boat."
In the town next to the one I grew up in, there was a house next to the interstate with bunch of big satellite dishes in their backyard (and I didn't live in a small farming area with lots of empty land; densely populated suburbs on the outskirts of the main city. Four out of every five backyards were the same size-and not that big) The dishes are long gone, although I still drive by the yard and see remnants of where the dishes used to be
As I remember those times 1980''s and 1990's , at home I had a 4-meter dish and I saw many channels but I remember that I needed a larger size because the footprint of the satellites required a dish and other channels didn't reach the Transponder signal, I remember the encryption was analog with DigiCipher 1 after version 2, but in both encryptions the video was analogous, it was quite easy to decrypt, but the audio was digitally encrypted so it was more complicated to decrypt. After the use of digital signals MPGE 1 and 2 came, a complete change began both in the equipment and in the encryption of the satellite signals, since there was a wide range of possibilities and of course in the size of the dishes, (Ku band)
There is or was actually a man living in Brasil who moved there from Europe. To receive his home channels, he had such an enormous dish set up himself that pointed towards 19.2 degrees to receive TV channels distributed via the satellites in orbit on that position.
We had one of these in our backyard when we moved in in the mid 2000s, but it was really old and there was also a smaller one on the side of the roof. Actually, the big one might still be in one or more pieces behind the garage because it was never fully disposed of. One important thing to remember with these is that you don't spill tomato sauce or cheese on them by accident.
My aunt and uncle still has one in their yard, it’s no longer connected since they got direct TV years back. But they never had it taken down. Now it just collects dead leaves and serves as a massive bird bath.
UK In the late 90s Sky TV started giving away mini dishes with free installation, the entire country went nuts for them and that's why every 2nd house has a mini dish on it still to this day. On some apartment blocks they are literally smothered in mini dishes on the walls which looks like some dystopian future.
Many apartment buildings in the city near me have tons of antennas mounted to the roof, sometimes something like 20 of them. Reminds me of the apartment blocks in Half Life 2 - also very dystopian.
The electrolytic capacitors in your SSAVI descramblers are well past their expiration dates. Most of the boards I've seen predate SMD components and were frequently hand soldered, making them easy to repair. Especially when digital oscilloscopes can be purchased for a few hundred dollars instead of the tens of thousands they were when SSAVI was actually considered "encryption."
In Germany you can still use sat-TV as an free alternative to cable TV, for public channels and all free to air private channels. I have over 50 different channels to watch. Nearly all public channels are 720p HD and private channels are 576i SD (not 480p).
Ha! Yes, we had one when I was a kid in the 80s. I remember we used to have to -manually- go out and move it to point to a different satellite (which made a different set of channels available). This went on for years and we eventually got a device that moved it automatically. Then, it became obsolete and just sat unused for years before being removed (not an easy feat as it was huge & had a cement foundation that went down a couple feet or so, for stability.
I live in Florida where it rains pretty much every day in the afternoon. Satellite TV service sucks here. My father bought a dish, like the ones you show here. He paid 1000 dollars for a used one with a descrambler and it worked during a tropical storm
Maybe console yourself with the fact that you have RUclips and so much other on-demand streaming content, instead of scanning the skies hoping something interesting is on.
Move to the Middle East then, there’s no cable tv whatsoever. Everything is broadcasted through satellite 📡 even premium sport channels. The fact that you guys have to pay to watch tv is mind boggling to me.
@@al3ndlib There's free OTA transmissions using terrestrial transmitters and receivers. Most of the US can receive a few dozen channels this way, unless you're in a place that's really remote, or really hilly.
It's not too late! The receivers are dirt cheap! You just need a dish! Ku band is fun to find feeds on if you only have a 3-4ft dish. I have a 10ft dish for C band and watch most of USA cable networks free! Encryption keys are available.
My family had one of these. You could watch pretty much anything you wanted. The biggest downside was the dish having to move every time you went to a new satellite. You always missed the beginning of the show/movie.
I was a kid in the late 80s and 90s, we had a big ol satellite well into the 90s, but I grew up in the rural mountains of Western North Carolina and we had to get a descrambler. We had it long enough to where I clearly remember watching my first dirty movie on it, if you were lucky you could find such classy entertainment unscrambled. Those were good times.
Ahhhh yeah i remember those! Growing up a neighborhood friend of mine had one. Him and his family are hispanic and always had telemundo on at the house along with other spanish channels
When I was a kid I remember someone telling me that satellite dishes didn't have any commercials. I don't know if this is true, but I was told live broadcasts kept running and you could see what they where doing in the studio while the commercials run. For instance during Saturday Night Live you could see them getting ready for the next skit.
Its true commercials are added locally its still this way today if you watch some pirated tv chans on internet you can still get no commercials as they are getting their source directly from sat
@@vinizan - It was true for some broadcasts but others would cut their signals during breaks, I recall several folks getting into trouble and feeding conspiracy theories with statements made during breaks thinking nobody outside the studio would see/hear it. Some conspiratards have edited old break clips to manipulate them for conspiracy theory nonsense too. I once watched a U.S. politician crack a joke about dead children in Iraq on an uncut news feed(I want to say CNN but can't recall) on my uncle's dish in the early 90's - when the host leaned over and whispered something to him he looked right at the camera with a big "oh shit" look on his face finding out his comments may not be so private, lol. Not sure if anything came from that but probably not, internet wasn't a big thing then so unless a news agency covered it on T.V. or newspapers most folks wouldn't know it happened. I always enjoyed that stuff as you sometimes got to see the real people(for better or worse) instead of the characters/persona's they used in public.
The size of the dish is for signal gain (due to the lower power); it is the receivers and associated components at the focal point that determine the operating frequency. Good video!
My grandfather who lived in the mountains for a while had one of these. I assumed that he had to pay, I never asked him. He had some kind of printed paper TV guide that was a lot more complicated than the ones I was used to reading. I guess different batches of channels were on different satellites and the dish would reorient itself. The one time I sat down and tried to use it he got angry at me for flipping channels without planning in advance what I wanted to watch which I guess was a rule in his house and was a rule for my mom growing up.
you can still do this today, most satellites have free-to-air channels and you only need one mini-dish per satellite. However, there are apps on Android TV which bundle these free channels, making dishes redundant.
This is great!! My grandparents had one of these big dishes in their back yard, and of course, it was hit by lightning and fried the Zenith TV. Good times. I feel old just saying that.
My dad had one with the motorized option. I remember up until the early nineties getting unfettered access to HBO, Disney Channel, even weird channels that would just play every episode of a syndicated show all in a row without commercials. I watched many cartoons that way. It also had porno channels. At that point the pay per view channels were mostly scrambled and you needed a descrambler unit. As a kid i still remember some of the channel names that I liked to watch. For instance Disney channel was G-24. Good times. My intro to the world of piracy. It wasn't the last either .... ;D
I would guess those syndicated show marathons were for transmission to local stations that bought rights to rerun the show daily. I'd think they'd more likely send a batch of a week's worth of episodes at once, along with the promos for each episode, but maybe they'd do a whole run.
I remember Disney east and west moved around a bit, would stay on one spot for about 3-7 years, then move. I remember the satellite and transponder numbers after 1994... but not as much before. And I do remember the channels which were obviously pay per view, and trying to use the skew and minute adjustments to try and see it.... usually to no avail.
I recall seeing them on roof tops, and often in back yards and at the colleges (I attended) a few local TV stations as well, always thought they were cool... A couple years ago I recycled a neighbor's dish for them, made about $40.
My grandpa had one. When I was real young I would wate for him to change chanels run out on his deck just to see it move. Then as a teen it was really cool he could get like 15 different HBO channel's so much more than cable at our house, but the cable at the house was way better than the 3 Channel's we had before cable. Also that big ass dish always got reception blizzard no problem. Little dish net work is out no mater the weather.
In my case, in answer to the titular question, trees grow up around and through them. I'd forgotten that it was there for about a decade. It took me half an hour hunting around in new growth cedars to find the remnants.
Satellite TV is alive and well for both C and Ku Band, if you're not interested in channels like HBO, ESPN, Discovery there are many Free To Air (FTA) channels available, all you need is a satellite receiver like GT Media or AMIKO, an actuator for your C Band dish and a new C-Band LNB, or for Ku Band you need a 100 cm dish, Ku-Band LNB and a USALS H-H motor. In Europe we use only Ku Band satellite dish is the solution for both cable and Over The Air TV newer TVs have a satellite tuner built and a CI+ Module for Pay TV cable and satellite channels you only get a CI Card to descramble the channels. Also you don't need rabbit ears or rooftop antenna, the channels that are available OTA (Over the Air) are also available on satellite. In Europe you don't have the problem that youlive in a rural area and your antenna doesn't receive a single channels, you mount an 80 - 100 cm dish and you have more than 200 channels. As for North America I recommend Robbie Strike and Northcoaster Hobby channels on RUclips for FTA satellite channels.
Back in the eighties my parents had that 8-foot dish. Like you said they started scrambling stuff and also the L and B had I had to change out in the 90s to still receive. Since then my parents this place is gone and I have a suspicion that those satellites are still in function so if someone wanted to they could probably still get free channels
These were very common in Brazil until 10 years ago because the country is huge, but we used it for public television since a lot of cities the local public channels are few and don't have enough power to reach the whole city. It died out when they switched public channels to digital because the equipment (available there) only allowed analog. We still had the antenna in our house until 5 years ago, although it wasn't being used anymore, we used it until 2014 or so. I think there were around 15-20 public channels.
Unencrypted C-band satellites were still common in the 2010s and is actually how some TV piracy groups in the US (LOL/DIMENSION) would get the shows released online while the credits were still rolling on broadcast television. They would record the shows earlier in the day when they were being distributed to affiliates, they didn't tend to release before the show had aired as not to tip their hand. These days however the quality of streaming/VOD is often far superior to the 720p or even 1080p C-band transmissions that these groups would capture so It isn't really worth it any more.
I recall grabbing a few shows I had missed recording, and they had actually been released BEFORE the broadcast in my area, sometimes days before. It may depend on content, as syndicated shows didn't have a fixed day/time the local channel needed to air it on. Also, I don't recall them actually hiding that these were C-band feeds at all.
@@marsilies The groups I named used to blur out the logo in the corner, but there wasn't actually any logo there to blur because the c-band transmissions didn't have them. Sometimes shows would air in Canada before the US also, so that's how some groups got them a day or so early too.
I still have a 10ft dish today. Picture quality is much better than the compressed streaming services. 1080i looks amazing straight from the source. I have encryption keys to watch most of the cable networks on C Band.
The large home satellite dishes were technically known back then as Television receive-only (TVRO) dishes but were nicknamed BUD (Big Ugly Dish). Their prevalence in mountainous regions of West Virginia in the 80's/early 90's had them also being sometimes nicknamed the "West Virginia state flower" by locals back then. Where I currently live, a more rural part of SoCal, I see them rusting away from time to time in peoples backyards. But back in the day they could be the only way rural folks could get Pay TV channels and maybe even the only way to get a decent over-the-air broadcast TV signals so as ugly and awkward as they seem to younger folks these days, remember this was the only good option for TV reception some people had at one time. You still see some of them in use these days but not for C-Band TV channel reception but rather as either a) modified to receive direct broadcast satellite (DBS) channels (The large dish illuminates the rain fade associated with smaller dishes) b) as dish-to-dish wireless data transmitters, and c) for other Radio transmitting applications.
I love the video although I found it a little creepy because I was thinking about this about a week ago. A couple of my friends had them when I was little growing up. Seeing this video pop up made me feel like somebody was reading my mind. Great video
My parents had one of the first ones from around 1980 at our old house that the previous owners had installed. It was already obsolete and no longer worked by the late 80s, and they never got to use it. This one was fiberglass and even bigger than most of the old C-band dishes that were big. They immediately started trying to get rid of it, but before they were able to do so, in a beyond bizarre occurrence, my dad accidently set part of it on fire when trying to kill a wasp nest on the back of it with gasoline.
I had a C-Band dish in Alaska, when it got too cold out the motor would stop working and one person would have to go out and manually turn the dish while there was a person in the middle shouting out the signal strength lol.
Oh, those were the days
How about when there would be a bad lightning storm, and blew out the motor on your dish which happened to my uncle a couple times over the years, and I had a neighbor's dish get struck so hard it went down the line hit the decipher box, which then blew up their TV connected to the box.
Love that story! Thanks for sharing.
Now hold it there! I want to watch this movie!
Good wife happy life..
my father had one 3 meter dish in germany in 90s, mounted 15 meter high (3 story building with long antenna mast on it) over a small hill. watched english simpsons before any localization existed. was THE motivation to learn english. it was movable, and could recive from geostationary satellites near the horizon. early descrambling was easy.
Mid 90's I got a second hand 1.5m dish which I had in my parents garden. It too was movable so was able to pick up both CNN & Discovery from a US satellite & European channels from several European satellites from the UK. All without any descrambling required
We had one from 1989 till we replaced it in 1996 or so we lived in the middle of nowhere. When we got internet it was like 10kb on a 54kb modem untill we moved in 2001 we did get a small dish after 96 but fed big dish was still there when we moved.
We still have a motorised dish to this day
@@Almighty_Flat_Earth Dude,get a better troll pitch.
Mein deutscher kamerad xD
If you were an early enough adopter to satellite you could bypass the scramblers. When I was in high school my friend's dad was a journalist for the big tech magazines. They were able to tap raw signals and watch broadcasters pick their noses before they went on air, which was a favorite story of their family. They had access to every channel being broadcast, and he would watch shows that were totally unheard of in our region.
Sounds like you caught wild feeds from the local stations' satellite mobile broadcast trucks.
@@needfuldoer4531 I'm unsure. I'm remembering second-hand stories I was told in the late 90s and very early 2ks. I believe they could tap studio feeds at one point, from what I remember of their stories. Tales of broadcasters cursing and whatnot before they suddenly became upstanding and proper. That sort of thing.
@@infinityryvus Ooh that sounds interesting, I wonder if people recorded the shows and stuff on tapes
You could bypass the scramblers in the 90s with the smaller antennas too.
If you set up a linear Ku satellite you can pick up the wild feeds and watch reporters do all sorts of dumb shit.
I remember back in the 80's, at the state fair, dish sellers had a setup to demonstrate what the dishes could do. This was back in the day when the ABC Evening News was broadcast from New York, Washington and Chicago. It was pretty cool watching the broadcast and being able to see and hear the anchors and producers talking back and forth to each other during what would have been a commercial break for everybody else watching regular broadcast TV.
That reminded me of mall kiosks I'd sometimes see in some malls in Singapore where people would somehow get away with promoting (and maybe also selling) pay TV piracy boxes. The last time I saw such a kiosk was 1 or 2 years ago, though.
I can't believe the VIDEO failed to mention that users could tune in to channels from all over the world. Kudos to all the commenters sharing stories of people they knew who used their giant satellite dishes to tune in to channels from other countries!
Any adult channels? 🤔
Yes,real extreme and vivid channel on 127 west c band free,free and yes its 2022,over 200 free channels available,and yes c band still works and yes it's 2022.
No that is not right, you simply cant pick up satelites, that are not pointing at the country, where you want tuo pickup the signal, i cant pick up american satelite tv here in germany for example, , However i can for example Puck up the "Brittish Spotbeam" just fine, i get all the free channels on Astra 19,2°E ( German channels send their program on this satelite, but also Spanish stations and many more countries, hoewer i dont speak spanish ) And Astra 28,2 (UK TV , so BBC/ITV7STV Channel 4 .....) Ant these are not the only satelites that you can recive here.
Because he was more invested in knocking big satellites, wth.
I'm from Indonesia. Many Chinese Indonesians still use this big satellite dishes to watch broadcasts from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
I used to sell and install the big dishes back in the '80s. It was amazing how many channels you could get, back then it was common for cable TV to only supply 12 ~ 30 channels. I remember watching the Daytona 500 feed from Daytona to the network, during the commercial times the announcers would chat amongst themselves thinking they weren't on the air.
yeah, we went from 3 channels on rabbit ears... to suddenly more than we could count.
I watched plenty of baseball back then, it was great
The network live feeds were great you got to see what everyone else missed when they watched the commercials and the network feeds of syndicated shows was great you could record episodes of your favorite shows sometimes 3-4 days early. You could find any sporting game raw broadcast.
Yeah we had one during the late 80's and into the 90's. I loved watching the feeds for all the NFL games and how when it went to commercial you got to listen to the announcers talking off air. What was really amazing for me as a kid was during the Gulf war and Desert Storm watching live raw video footage of the war when networks cut away the feed kept going on Satellite. I was glued to the TV.
@@steve-ph9yg Exactly! .. Brings good memories of my old man and I,.. we used to watch together for instance Star Trek:TNG early Saturday around noon, a few days before broadcast, all 5 acts, and the promos without commercials. Even though I was the Sci-Fi buff, my dad always wanted to watch it with me, and in the end got him hooked. It wasn't rare to hear him sometimes: "when's the new Star Trek? Come on, let's go, move the dish! " =)
The best part is there were no artificial restrictions on what you could watch. I could watch feeds in Canada, Mexico or any of the states without being blocked. There was also a lot of interesting 3rd party content; lots of religious stations, people that rented time to produce their own shows and the occasional nutcase prophesizing the end of the world. It was a blast.
Gene Scott
Oh yes, the religious broadcasts were particulary hilarious, some of them. There was some guy who spent the broadcast slumped in a chair, mumbling into a microphone about... I never quite figured out what, but at the end of one of his weird interludes he'd pass it off to the house band to play some Christian rock. So many televangelists trying to convince their flock to give up their hard earned pensions so the pastor can pay for his new mansion lol.
Basically, the Internet before the Internet
@@denniseldridge2936I bet you sent money to Bernie, because YOU are smart
@@leogama3422 no that would be Nintendo's claim to fame. Very close to the internet before internet but internet has been around as an overall concept and technology since I want to say like the 40 to the 50 although I could be wrong about that as we know it today it's only been around since roughly 96 ish don't quote me on the years. You should look up Nintendo satellivision not only is it internet technically but it was the true first online gaming.. ain't that some shit
After getting married in 1993, and having cable for 6 months, we purchased the large dish. My equipment had the ability to handle all the sat's, you could manually adjust tracking, and it would even turn the dish and turn on your VCR to record the shows. I absolutely loved the big dish and really miss it. I could buy my channels a la carte, so I didn't have 50 channels I never watched. I only paid about $3,500 for my dish and receiver. Unfortunately, the packages kept going up in price and eventually it just didn't make sense anymore. Also, anytime you had snow or a strong wind, it would put the dish slightly out of balance and then your channels didn't display so the VCR just tapped garbage. Unless you were home to fine tune it, it was worthless. The company that did the adjustments wanted $60 every time to align it. That was in 1993-03. Just didn't make $$ sense.
The best part was taping and watching shows a few days in advance. A wednesday show would get beemed down on Monday. That killer Thursday lineup of ER, NYPD Blue, Friends and whatever still beemed down on Thursday, but in the afternoon. So we could sit down and watch them, commercial free, at 6pm and be done before they even aired on local tv.
That is fascinating. Thanks for sharing.
That would be like 7500 dollars in today's money 💰
My dad bought a big motorised satellite dish in the 90s, and sourced a decoder card with a telephone line so that it could update itself.
Had +1000 channels growing up 😂
It was kinda awesome hearing that dish move around when you went from one satellite to the next.
F424
My grandfather did the same thing in the 80's and 90's. I remember people calling all the time for the updated codes and whatnot. Then went to burning the cards for dish network and jailbreaking firesticks etc. There will always be a way around paying the man for tv.
I had one of these on a trailer in front of my house. I lived along a busy road and I let a local satellite tv dealer park it there for advertisement in exchange for free tv. The receiver had the "dealer chip" for the Videocypher II decoder so I had access to all channels. The west coast satellites were too low on my horizon due to trees, so I couldn't get a few of the premium channels. Different channels were on different satellites. For every system sold off that advertising I got to keep the trailer another week. Fun times. With that dealer chip I could even catch uplink feeds so I often caught Star Trek Next Generation episodes a few days before their air date.
Please do more videos like this. I love knowing more about 90's tech that was always sort of in the background but I never thought much about.
I literally NEVER thought about these dishes until this video lol
You didn't even get the decade right despite him telling you. Information uptake is a little slow.
These dishes were popular in the 80s. I should know I helped install them. The ones I hated the most were the early fiberglass ones with a steel inside to it. What killed them was the scrambling then encryption that came along. Prime Star then Dish did their share to end the big dish.
@@1stprinceoflite We sold a shit load of 8' fiberglass dishes. Late in the game we sold a lot of 10-12- mesh dishes.
@@ShainAndrews You know the reason why they had to have the consumer dish so big back then?
My father had one back in late 90s. We moved to a rather remote location so it was the only option to watch TV. One quirk with it was that it would only pick few channels, and if you want to view other set of channels, you have to physically point to dish to another satellite. So we will watch a set of channels for a month or so before switching to another set of channels.
So your family stayed on the satellite for a month.🤷♂️ I was moving satellites all the time every day.
my username is my way of remembering the 4dtv receiver.
good for you.
We would often move our dish a few times a day, got really good about knowing where those satellites were in the sky just off the horizon. More than once I recall hitting the dish with a football or basketball. Fortunately we had it mounted well enough we didn't loose the signal, but it did mean playing with the Skew and minute settings now and then.
Ours had a motor that would move the dish to programmed locations. We had about 24 satellites to choose from and each had 20 some odd channels.
@@N8deezy74 well.. look at Mr fancy pants over here.
What was cool was that you could watch the continuous satellite feed and see people on news sets or sporting events doing things or playing before going live on the air or during commercial breaks. There was once a news anchorwoman who was waiting to go live and ordered something from a magazine using her old school cell phone. She was on camera giving her credit card number and expiration date over the airwaves. I wonder how many hits it got?
surprising they didn't just switch to a different feed on their end they could easily just show a test card while not on air.'
@@jomarcentermjm back then you were not watching satellite through a network, you were watching the actual feed that was going to the network. It's like when you are at an actual sporting event. You still see what's going on in the stadium while the network is playing commercials. Before the crew went live the sound and broadcast engineers were working on the satellite signal.
I used to watch NBA games and listen to the announcers chit chat during the time everyone else was watching commercials.
Didn't realize those were already obsolete when I was a kid. I remember some people still having them in my area in the 90s & don't really ever remember hearing about modern satellite TV services for the first time until sometime close to 2000.
they were around like 5 years ago
put the first one in 1992 by then most of the good stuff was gone over the big dish and they also fixes the new 12GHz one's to about 26in with many more ch
they were not obsolete my dad bought one in 1991 and we enjoyed it all decade but we were a block from the beach so rust won.
@@JC-Utopic-Gauntlet That lasted quite long, I grew up in our beach resort and the metallic parts of our fences & gates don't last 2~3 years'ish?(didnt really take not I was a kid back then) even with thick paint.
LOL sounds like you also grew up in rural Arkansas MrChristianDT
we lived out in the country and the house is 600ft away from the road, so getting cable run all the way back there was quoted at several thousand dollars. So the parents opted for the satellite dish instead. We had that exact same video decipher they showed in this video. I remember the first day we got it installed...first thing we watched was Turkey TV on Nickelodeon.
You eventually learn the name of all the satellites and which number on the finder they associated with. 24 channels per satellite. Galaxy 1, Galaxy 2, Satcom 4 etc etc. There even was a special TV guide you could subscribe to. It was as thick as most monthly magazines and was nothing but channel guides. No fancy articles there.
I remember the magazines and remember looking for obscure satellites and transponders. Especially anything that could be showing Asian TV channels when they were still analog.
Orbit! I had totally forgotten about that magazine!
G7 was the shit.
My grandparents lived out in rural Montana and had one of those big satellite dishes in the 90s. They showed me how to use it and I was able to watch west coast baseball games broadcast on channels in Los Angeles and San Francisco. I was also able to find channels from Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Mexico with it.
Man. I forgot about the guides.
My sister and her husband bought a huge satellite dish (like 3 meters wide) back in 1987. I remember being amazed at all the channels - something like 500 or 1000 - from all over the world and all of it was free at the time.
You could reach around 30 satellites ("birds") and each had 24 transponders (channels) plus radio stations,..
@@carlsaveus1735
Some had 36 Channels 🤗
your sister and her husband lost money and are cable thieves
@@My-Pal-Hal that's right!
We never got that many on ours, I think 20-30 channels at most. I wonder if our location (Finland) was the cause, or the type of satelite dish, it was a fixed installation so only one satelite really. I did get to watch sci-fi channel in the late 90s when it showed so much interesting stuff. The discovery channel in the mid to late 90s was also fantastic. Today both are just pure crap....
I remember one of these in my neighborhood growing up that was painted like Pacman and had a cutout for the mouth, it's still standing i love it
Cool
My grandfather had a dish that was like 20 ft across in the 90s. As older kids we would tell our younger kid relatives it was because he was still a secret agent. In reality he was a huge Raiders fan, in an out of market area, in a very rural location that never ran cable lines. He got every channel though it was awesome.
No such thing. 10' was the maximum and frankly even that was over kill unless it was a mesh dish.
20ft across 😂 it must have pulled in signals from as far as Jupiter. 😮
@@mimusic1853 Uranus
@@Look_What_I_Did our cable company had a fiberglass 20 ft dish..late 1990s they offered it to me for free...buy it was connected to 4 barrels of concrete so I said no.....
@@Look_What_I_Did That's incorrect I know for a fact because I grew up in a household with my grandfather who had a 14 ft dish. Also does everybody in here realize that diameter is different from circumference or did you guys not take math?
When I was married to my first wife, we almost bought one. They were hugely popular. You're right. Bazillion channels for free. Her brother worked for a satellite company and he talked us into getting one. It was really expensive and we were going to sign a contract and he would install it for a really low price. Then, the bottom fell out of that market the day before we were going to sign up. That was close. Literally, the very next day, the day we were going to sign up, no one wanted one and he was out of a job a week later.
@Dacia Sandero guys thanks. Yeah, real close shave.
Satellite TV is quite nice now
At my parents' house, the dish is still standing up, unused for 20 years or more. Other than a place for birds to chill, it's a memory of old times.
Same. We got ours sometime around 1989. I remember watching the Gulf War live on it. The dish is still there but hasn't been used in forever.
As a chines Indonesiaan, my parents had 4m wide parabolic antena for taping chinese tv channel satelote back in 90s and early 2000. The motor system was still analog, and somewhat noisy. When I had to moved the antena, it felt like I was nasa scientist moving antena for Hubble (like in Armageddon movie) 🤣🤣
@Dimas Kresna dulu kayaknya analog. Sekarang gak tahu 😄
@@wilsonxyz92 sekarang udah digital dvb-s2
I actually grew up in West Virginia, and I can attest to the fact that these things were everywhere. I liked seeing them, but sadly they've slowly been taken down entirely.
I managed to keep my budget in northern Michigan by taking those dishes to salvage. The aluminum ones were worth a good bit of cash.
Ground mount pole could be use for photovoltaic panel.
Was visiting family in West Virginia recently, there are still many of these where they live.
Can't be drunk all day if you dont start in the morning
We had one of the older fiberglass ones and I remember all the way up to I think early 2000 2001 maybe we broke out the old equipment and tried it out just to see if it still work and there was still satellites that broadcasted and you could still pick it up I think it like C-SPAN but it was something that we had did for a long time and was shocked that it still did work it's gone now I think the post is still in the ground as a reminder
I remember my family getting one when I was younger. We moved from the city to an area where the TV signals were weak. My step-father bought a descramber and got everything. Was I liked about it is that we were able to see shows three hours earlier by watching east coast on the east coast schedule being on the west coast.
I heard a story where HBO took a satellite user to court over watching for free, the lawyer for the guy said "You don't want my client to see your signal, then get it off his property" and the judge agreed and threw the case out. Shortly after that is when they started encrypting the signal and decrypting a signal not meant for you is a crime so they at least had the law on their side after that.
That's just a Trailer Park Boys episode.
@@PURENT Never heard of them but I see that they started in 1999 and the case I saw was in the 80's so not the original source.
It's not against the law to decrypt signals. It is against the law to intercept and disseminate government signals. HBO eventually was able to charge people with simple theft up to grand larceny depending on how long they had it for free.
Think about it though. If I have a rogue encrypted signal attempting to access my hardware, I have every right to decrypt, destroy, and counterattack whoever is doing it, even the alphabet agencies. And trust me, if I was able to turn prism back on it's makers, I'd be sitting in a data center somewhere being catered to instead of fixing everyone's old computers and legacy POS networks. Point of Sale, not Piece of Excrement.
@@sublimationman I know there was something that the episode was based on... but after a quick perusal of HBO's corporate history in the 70s and 80s, I don't think it was HBO that we are thinking of...
>.>
but for the life of me I can't figure it out.
@@sublimationman that said, if you can appreciate the humor, TPB is a phenomenal show.
My grandma actually had one that functioned in the 90's I remember her changing the channel and watching the progress bar move as the dish repositioned
My grandmother's functioned until the early 2000's when it got struck by lighting, then she had to find a satellite provider. I miss not worming about losing the tv at her place when it rains or is too cloudy (the signal where she lives sucks to the point she needs her land line).
I used to wonder what happened to these. Now I finally get an answer to a question I had long forgotten but always used to wonder about.
"Hundreds of free TV channels from satellite" is still kinda true in Europe and other regions. Although most of them are either international news channels like BBC World or CNN International (although every half-big country has their own), or junk channels like TV shopping or religious evangelism. In some countries you get more or less the same channels as on terrestrial unencrypted, but these are usually broadcast in a narrow beam so they are nearly impossible to receive outside said country. In some other countries a similar offer is encrypted, but you can get a descrambler card for free or very cheap - as another way of region-locking those signals. A notable exception is Germany, who broadcasts 100+ channels of regular TV receivable pretty much all over Europe, unencrypted - including local versions of some that are paid pretty much everywhere else. Tuning into German satellite TV is a nice lifehack to watch some sporting events for free, if you can live with German commentary.
All of these are Ku-band, though, so no need for huge dishes.
Germany is so big (in European terms) that the TV broadcasters just buy the transmission rights for the whole Europe because shipping a decoder module to every German is more expensive...
Yeah, if only the HD channels would be for free as well. 😬
bbc and cnn are also junk channels.
@@boredmau5 They are in the UK as 'Freesat' channels
@@schnitzelsemmel technically they can't buy the rights to the whole European continent as that would eventually bankrupt German broadcasters. In fact, during the 2002 World Cup, a Spanish pay-TV broadcaster threatened to sue German public broadcasters because their signal was reaching Spain unscrambled and no German broadcaster had the rights for that tournament in the Spanish market.
I remember watching a wild feed of The Today Show. While Al Roker was interviewing Garth Brooks, Garth was telling a story about his kids. When they went to commercial, Al started telling Garth about something his own kid did, but it was obvious Garth could not care less about it. He was looking around, and even walked away and started a conversation with someone else nearby.
It definitely solidified my suspicions about Garth, and I actually felt kinda bad for Al.
WHERE ARE THE BODIES GARTH?
HA HA HA HA Just like the refugees
Are you sure it wasn't Bryant Gumbel?
Yeah those satellite feeds showed a lot of stuff that wasn't intended for on-air presentation. Some of the TV personalities came out looking not so hot.
Garth Brooks and his dark side……it’s been busted wide open in 2023.
I remembered when I was very young, we took a long drive to see family. They had one of those massive satellite dishes. So every time I see one I always think about those happy times we got to visit them.
I was impressed with how many channels you could get with one of those things. Over half of those channels were in other languages but you still got everything you ever wanted. I was amazed at the time that you were getting info from outer space.
My grandparents had one of these. But they lived WAY out in the sticks, and there was nothing else available back then. Plus, hand-crank to change the satellite. I got a GOOD workout whenever we went to stay with them.
This was random and hlarious! As someone who was born in the early 80's, I remember occasionally seeing these in people's yards and I knew they were about picking up television signals, but I had no idea why people really used them. Usually when you asked, you just got the basic response that it was just for television. As time went on, I stopped wondering, but now I finally understand.
Always fun/funny to look back at technology.
Actually I still saw these big dishes while working in Alaska, pointing nearly horizontal rather than up. They were so far from the satellites, that they needed these big things to pick up the signals.
That is true. The geosynchronous satellites are all located above the equator. So the farther north you go the lower the elevation of the dish.
My parents had one that used a metal mesh in pie cut sections for the dish itself. It was cool enough looking, that my dad used the pieces as grill inserts on a custom car he build in the early 2000s.
Yep we had that mesh one back in like 1988. Man it was cool. My mother made my step dad get rid of it when we moved in. She hated TV. It remained in the yard for years though.
I remember these dishes, though we never had one. From what I recall, some schools, institutions, and apartment complexes used them too, to run their own little private cable systems. My middle school even had one on a pole in a tiny courtyard, though I have no idea if it was still in use by the time I was a student in the mid-90s. (I think they had regular cable at an institutional rate by then.)
As for scrambling... Like I said in a reply, back in the days of analog scrambling, you could buy gray-market descramblers by mail order. Magazines like _Popular Science_ and _Popular Mechanics_ here in the US always had some sellers in the classified ads in the back. Naturally, the switch to digital made these obsolete. Lots of pay-TV signals got properly encrypted instead, making them pretty impossible to crack unless someone leaked the key -- which did happen sometimes, judging by other comments. 🙂
And on a related note, many of these gray-market sellers also sold Macrovision defeat devices, which dealt with a form of copy deterrent on VHS tapes.* Basically, Macrovision messed with the signal in ways that would trip up most VCRs' tracking and gain control when recording a copy -- but that a TV wouldn't care about when viewing the original. Though not all VCRs were affected by it; older VCRs in particular weren't automatic enough, and Betamax was always impervious to it.
Technology Connections has a video about Macrovision, if you want to know more: ruclips.net/video/-VqsU1VK3mU/видео.html
* some DVDs have it too
Born in the mid 80's I kind of remember the tail end of these being used, but mostly the smaller dishes had already taken over by the time I got old enough. However I always thought the large dishes looked cool - specifically the black mesh ones. Honestly to this day, I still kind of wouldn't mind having one set up in my yard even just as decoration lol.
Born in 80 so I remember them before DirecTV and Dishnetwork.
C Band just got most everything below 4 GHz chopped off to make way for "mid band" 5 G. For awhile we had C Band to ourselves, but I remember the very early days when C Band was shared with AT&T Long Lines which used C Band for point to point relay stations for long distance calls and even network TV distribution before the satellites were launched.
I'm a logger and flagger for the state of KY and in the mountains I still see these everywhere in people's yards as we find our tress along the meandering country roads. Some look almost new and I'd guess that they still use them for something like mentioned in the video. Very cool! Thanks for the info! 😃
My Grandpa bought one of those because we lived in rural NC & back then, the cable companies didn’t go out that far. SO Many channels!!
I actually used to have one of these huge dishes in my backyard in SoCal that my brother and I used to skate in. Dad brought it home from his job that dealt with the large C-Ban dishes everyday and it was a de-commissioned dish. Was quite interesting.
I remember watching satellite tv at my uncle's house, he had a huge 2m antenna with driver motor so his son and I could select any of the satellites available and then search for interesting broadcasts. Many years later my father also purchased satellite dish, although much smaller and fixed on Astra satellite. It was still a lot of fun to have amost a hundred of programs instead of 2 available locally.
I still had two dishes on my roof two years ago, when finally I decided to remove them while installing photovoltaic panels. Although I wasn't using them since ages, I got sad seeing them lying on the ground before being taken to the scrapyard... Something that once brought so much fun, innovation and feel of a better world now became so obsolete that noone would want to take it 😢
Yeah, one the big attraction of Sat dish was that in rural areas TV reception was often crappy and limited to 4-5. Having a dish was mind blowing change for rural areas, but in the late 90s came the small dish companies, which made dishes affordable to every home.
Astra was big back in the day!
I picked one up from a local farmer in 2002, I was building a house and put it in the ceiling of the guest bedroom. We call it the Dome Room. 800 lbs of plaster and it looks awesome.
As a General licensed amateur radio operator, I’m impressed at how well this video explains the technical use of using larger dishes.
73
furonwarrior, I still have mine. I use it for DXing. There is still a lot of FTA (free to air) stuff out there, particularly from other countries.
And as a Ham, you might be interested in using it for radio astronomy. Easy to do and most everything you need is available off the shelf. Of course it won't compete with a professional setup, but a lot of fun for the hobbyist.
I had one up until a couple of years ago. Was building an EME rig.
By the time i got it up and was getting the rest of the equip, trees limbs got in the way of the LOS.
couldn't cut em down, nor even trim a window through them.
We had a dish as a kid. We got 700 channels from all over the world now thats a lot. At the time it was not even fathomable. I remember the dish moving and catching the signal lol.
I remember back in the late 90s when satellite companies first started scrambling channels. It was a weapons race between them and the hackers. In the beginning, it was relatively easy to overcome the primitive encryption, with a leaked password that would last you months. But by early 2000 it was such a hassle keeping up with the newer and stronger encryption. That it had become easier to just pay the monthly subscription. By then the subscription had also fallen in price making it more appealing to most.
It wasn't so much that it was easier to pay the subscription as it was TV was so bad it wasn't worth doing any work to watch it.
That wasn't when they first started scrambling - that happened about 15 years before. You're thinking of the cracking of direct-to-home digital service like DirecTV. They were encrypted from the start, but there were many security holes and there was a constant arms race between the hackers and the satellite TV companies (or, more specifically, the subcontractors like NDS and Nagravision that provided the security/encryption layer). They finally closed the last of the big security holes around 2004 when they swapped out the chip cards in subscribers' devices for a new generation of cards that were "unloopable."
This was a fun time for those of us who liked free TV.
@Jesus has given you all. Repent or die. Jebus spam.
they actually started scrambling in 1985 with hbo and cinemax being the first..all the common c band networks were scrambled by the late 90s
@@flapjack9495
Oh Yeah,.. The Cards 😂
Almost forgot about those. But I found a lot of the blacked out and pay per view stuff you could find broadcast in the Clear on the Ku-band satellites. Got a lot of free sports and fights back then.
But,.. I didn't tell my Friends I got them for Free. Hell. I bought the satellite system. And had to spend time finding the feeds. They can supply the Beer 😂🍻👍
I have one in my backyard. 22 years ago I could change the tv channel and hear it start buzzing and watch it slowly point to a different spot in the sky. Took about a minute to change between certain channels that were far apart. When the receiver stopped working I replaced it with 77 magnetrons from old microwave ovens. Now I use it to melt my enemies from afar
Bonus thing, add an oversized taser circuit to it, and do a drive-by of your local Tesla dealer or tech store.
Lol that is awesome
Truthfully the 2.450 ghz band that microwave ovens are in are an amateur radio band and they use those magnetrons and these dishes to bounce the signal off the moon. One ham I know points his dish at the neighbors dog and night and when he barks he taps the morse code key and the dog yelps. The dog wont bark any more because every time he does he gets several megawatts of microwave energy zapping him LOL.
We're gonna fix your brain with a little bit of pain... (wack) I've got a big knacker for you! Its a great song.
UK here, we got the big dish sometime in the late 80's i think, i remember being wowed by it and how it moved. I think it could pick up 2 satellites called intelsat and eutelsat or something like that. I remember sneaking down at night and watching the "foreign" channels as they had loads of nudity in them lol.
If I remember correctly it was usually the German channels had the nudity
@@PeterMountUK Ah, some things never change
@@PeterMountUK You freaky Germans.
@@Keepskatin South Park movie wasn't wrong.
I think one of the satelites was called Astra
There is still stuff "in the clear" on C-Band satellite. I recommend checking out the RUclips channels Robbie Strike & Northcoaster Hobby for more information on what "in the clear" channels, & other stuff, are available on C-Band nowdays.
I remember my father picking up one of those in the late 1990s (likely for free). It was set up, but I don't think it ever did anything. As a kid I thought it made our house the coolest on the street.
Back in 91 my dads boss had a dish. My older brother and I got busted watching Eddy Murphy on HBO because our parents came back and we rushed to change the channel not realizing the dish was going to move as they walked past it.
Very funny 😂😂 At least in 1991 party lines were no longer used, so you could at least have some assurance of privacy talking to your boyfriend/girlfriend on the phone assuming the cord was long enough to reach 😄
I remember the descramblers. It was the first widespread anti-consumer DRM.
Also the 'criminal' services that would sell you the codes to de-scramble the signals...
Like the descrambler guy😂
Yeah, and it was probably a conspiracy. You should research this and tell everyone your findings.
They are still in use today to send live events from shows (Grammy’s, concerts, etc) to the network for distribution for broadcast TV or live stream online. C Band also has much better video quality than the pizza pan dishes. Think about it. You can’t fit the same 40mbps video quality per stream (frequency) on a 1/2ft dish that you can on a 10ft dish! The amount of signal strength just isn’t there. That’s why Directv and Dish Network quality looks like ass, because they compress 20 channels to one 40mbps stream so each channel only gets 2mbps (yuck). There are hobbyists that use these large dishes to view these uncompressed high quality feeds today. Why are we selling 4K and 8K TVs but broadcasting 2mbps “HD Lite” feeds? Makes no sense.
C-Band itself doesn’t reel in better quality video. After all, they’re all just digital streams. You can indeed fit a 40mbps video onto a ku band transponder that’s receivable by smaller dishes. You’re comparing broadcast quality feeds with a provider like DirecTV. Obviously the satellite provider is going to want to fit as many channels into one transponder as possible. It’s cheaper for them and the vast majority of people won’t notice the reduction in quality. Satellite feeds however are usually just one video stream on the transponder meaning it can use up all the bandwidth available on that transponder. They are often also using 4:2:2 chroma subsampling which looks better than the 4:2:0 that we see on TV. These also aren’t anywhere near “uncompressed”, they’re still very much compressed, just nowhere near as compressed as a bandwidth starved tv channel would be.
@@stephendolan3217 DirecTV and Dish use Ka Band not KU, and are grasping for bandwidth, so they jam as many channels as they can onto one 40mbps stream. Sure they "CAN" send one video stream at 40mbps, but they will run out of frequencies real fast. KU band has rain fade problems too. HBO did a rain fade test on KU band years ago, I think they got up to a 12ft KU solid dish and gave up. Still had rain fade issues. C-band is the only medium that nearly eliminates the issue (with the right equipment) and has the bandwidth capabilities. 40mbps @ 4:2:0 still blows away anything DirecTV is sending down @ their HD Lite crap. it's gross.
@@MrAlanisrox69 ah I see. Over here in Europe we pretty much exclusively use Ku band. With Sky television here over in the UK and Ireland I don’t recall ever seeing rain fade. The only times we would lose channels would be when the dish would blow out of alignment. Doing some quick Googling it looks like the technology has become so good that it has reached similar stability as C-Band Also doesn’t it not matter what band they operate in, they’re still gonna squeeze as many channels into one transponder as possible. C and Ku band have pretty much identical bandwidth right? It must be a lot worse over there because we have up to 12 channels per 50Mbps transponder and it looks very acceptable. I’ve only ever used Ka band for a few channels as it hasn’t been adopted over here much. Ireland has Ka band for the 1-2% that can’t receive its terrestrial network and from what I’ve seen, it works perfectly. They are using spot beams though. I think the bottom line is that normal people aren’t going to complain about the video quality but they would definitely complain about having a 3-metre dish in their back yard! There’s a reason why this technology has died out!
@@stephendolan3217 I guess if the power level of the satellite is high enough, rain fade could potentially be somewhat alleviated. Here in the US, on a 1.2M dish, on the strongest transponder on KU, with QPSK transmission you get about 18dB. Not sure what transmission types they use in Europe. The backhaul feeds use S2 8PSK to get higher bitrates in the smaller frequency.
@@MrAlanisrox69 we use DVB-S QPSK for SD transponders and then DVB-S2 8PSK for HD transponders. I get around 16-19db on both using a 60cm dish. Looks like they’re much higher power here
My friend's parents had a C-band dish in the 1980s. She said that she could see the raw feeds coming from the networks. Before the network evening news would start up, she could see what the anchors were doing at the news desk to prepare. Sometimes (or maybe all the time) they would swear before the TV broadcast started.
true i remember watching that
being a early 80's baby I remember our family having one and was fascinated by it, later on my Dad worked at a local TV station and they had the big descramblers that could decode anything, he used to bring home tapes of WWF and WCW wrestling to mail it to family up to a week ahead of time lol. Now I work in Radio broadcast and C band is still alive and well, in March 2022 we installed a brand new C band dish, most major talk shows like Sean Hannity, Rush, ESPN Radio, NASCAR, major sports games, Westwood One (music) as well as NPR (National Public Radio) are all still delivered on C Band with internet being the backup if all else fails.
back in the 1990s, having satellite tv and 400 channels was a flex, a status symbol. my dad had an extra large one in his backyard that was inoperable, and we did not have extra channels. now I understand why
As a Brazilian, I got most of my knowledge by watching TV and we had one of those, but it don't matches what was said, here, we had "Brasilsat" (and we still have) satellites that were free for everyone to use, no scrambling whatsoever, you only had to have the dish and the receiver and you had access to numerous national grade channels and FM stations from all around the country. Those satellites are still functioning and my cousins use them for free in 2022 (I used it from 1997 to 2012), of course, it also transmits digital channels which are free and you only needs a digital capable receiver to watch it. (Of course, there's the other satellites which transmits paid content and there's illegal receivers to break the encryption, some with two antennas or two LNB's, or one antenna and internet connection, here, they're called "Sky gato", or if you don't want dishes at all, you can go to illegal IPTV streamers which have specialized receivers for it, called "TV Box").
amazonas satellite hahahha
Interesting! Thanks for sharing.
I'm from West Virginia and I remember seeing these large satellites everywhere. One of my neighbors had a very large one where I actually climb in the dish and used to slide off of it.
they make a great roof for a gazebo or little cabin in the woods. as I have done. it is solid fiberglass. ,,,, WV
We had one growing up in northern Alberta. My dad would send us out to sweep the snow off of it during the winter. 😂
In Europe it's still common to use a satelite dish for TV. it's not as big as in the video. We only receive TV with the dish in my house. I don't have a subcription either.
@@Raaaphael that’s literally normal everywhere now days
Friend of mine in 89 had one in his back yard. One night lightning struck it and every single electronic device in his household either exploded, caught fire or both. This included VCR, TVs, computer, fridge, freezer, lamps, Roland keyboard and oven.
Always wanted one. When I bought my first house in 2000, I put letters in the mailboxes of homes that had ones to see if someone would sell me one. For $50, I got a great 10 foot dish the wiring, and a Drake converter box. This was how I watched TV until 2006 when the last signals up there went away.
Fast forward 12 years and it turns out there are now a lot of digital channels up there. I went out and did the same thing and now our new house has a 10 footer that picks up all kinds of strange stuff from outer space. Raw feeds, stations you won't find anywhere else, and 1000's of radio feeds. It's a really cool hobby!
Hey that's pretty neat. I still see these in people's backyard but they are often covered in junk.
If you have a way to take one home, then you should drive up to the person's house, and offer to take it off their hands if they no longer want it, as you can still pickup free digital C-Band signals with correct descrambler box.
Born and raised in WV and I remember seeing these everywhere growing up. I drove past one a few days ago and thought, "I wonder what those are/were for because there's no way they're still in use." Good timing on the video!
My grandparents who lived in a rural mountainous section of the north western US had one of these old dishes but by the early 90s it wasn't even upright anymore they were using it as a flower bed.
Same here except it was extreme Eastern Maine (BFE/6 miles to New Brunswick, CA). Nearest store is an hour drive. They used there's right up to 2018.
My neighbor installed one in the mid-80s, and he was so proud of all the channels he could get. His TV guide was the size of a magazine. "I can get all kinds of TV - Russian TV, Chinese TV, Europe, everywhere! I can get all the cable and movie channels too!" I glances over his kids glued to their TV - they were watching "Love Boat."
I remember those magazines but on some of those you had to be a engineer to understand them. Such cool times.
In the town next to the one I grew up in, there was a house next to the interstate with bunch of big satellite dishes in their backyard (and I didn't live in a small farming area with lots of empty land; densely populated suburbs on the outskirts of the main city. Four out of every five backyards were the same size-and not that big)
The dishes are long gone, although I still drive by the yard and see remnants of where the dishes used to be
As I remember those times 1980''s and 1990's , at home I had a 4-meter dish and I saw many channels but I remember that I needed a larger size because the footprint of the satellites required a dish and other channels didn't reach the Transponder signal, I remember the encryption was analog with DigiCipher 1 after version 2, but in both encryptions the video was analogous, it was quite easy to decrypt, but the audio was digitally encrypted so it was more complicated to decrypt.
After the use of digital signals MPGE 1 and 2 came, a complete change began both in the equipment and in the encryption of the satellite signals, since there was a wide range of possibilities and of course in the size of the dishes, (Ku band)
There is or was actually a man living in Brasil who moved there from Europe.
To receive his home channels, he had such an enormous dish set up himself that pointed towards 19.2 degrees to receive TV channels distributed via the satellites in orbit on that position.
We had one of these in our backyard when we moved in in the mid 2000s, but it was really old and there was also a smaller one on the side of the roof. Actually, the big one might still be in one or more pieces behind the garage because it was never fully disposed of. One important thing to remember with these is that you don't spill tomato sauce or cheese on them by accident.
My aunt and uncle still has one in their yard, it’s no longer connected since they got direct TV years back. But they never had it taken down. Now it just collects dead leaves and serves as a massive bird bath.
I only knew the modern small ones as a 2000s kid. But at some place I once saw such a gigantic one and was flattered how cool it looked.
Do you perhaps mean flabbergasted instead of flattered?
UK In the late 90s Sky TV started giving away mini dishes with free installation, the entire country went nuts for them and that's why every 2nd house has a mini dish on it still to this day. On some apartment blocks they are literally smothered in mini dishes on the walls which looks like some dystopian future.
Many apartment buildings in the city near me have tons of antennas mounted to the roof, sometimes something like 20 of them. Reminds me of the apartment blocks in Half Life 2 - also very dystopian.
The ISP I work for still has a handful of C-band dishes, though we are finally phasing them out bit by bit because the descramblers are so unreliable!
Probably has something to do with the descramblers being old tech that's been running 24/7 for years.
The electrolytic capacitors in your SSAVI descramblers are well past their expiration dates. Most of the boards I've seen predate SMD components and were frequently hand soldered, making them easy to repair. Especially when digital oscilloscopes can be purchased for a few hundred dollars instead of the tens of thousands they were when SSAVI was actually considered "encryption."
Newsgroups in bulk use to be sent via satellite.
In Germany you can still use sat-TV as an free alternative to cable TV, for public channels and all free to air private channels. I have over 50 different channels to watch. Nearly all public channels are 720p HD and private channels are 576i SD (not 480p).
576 sounds like the old PAL standard
Same in the US. Some of them are 1080.
Ha! Yes, we had one when I was a kid in the 80s. I remember we used to have to -manually- go out and move it to point to a different satellite (which made a different set of channels available). This went on for years and we eventually got a device that moved it automatically. Then, it became obsolete and just sat unused for years before being removed (not an easy feat as it was huge & had a cement foundation that went down a couple feet or so, for stability.
I live in Florida where it rains pretty much every day in the afternoon. Satellite TV service sucks here. My father bought a dish, like the ones you show here. He paid 1000 dollars for a used one with a descrambler and it worked during a tropical storm
The fact that I became an adult too late to own one of those is one of my small lingering regrets.
Maybe console yourself with the fact that you have RUclips and so much other on-demand streaming content, instead of scanning the skies hoping something interesting is on.
@@marsilies I don't necessarily disagree. I just wish I could receive RUclips via an obscenely huge satellite dish is all.
Move to the Middle East then, there’s no cable tv whatsoever. Everything is broadcasted through satellite 📡 even premium sport channels. The fact that you guys have to pay to watch tv is mind boggling to me.
@@al3ndlib There's free OTA transmissions using terrestrial transmitters and receivers. Most of the US can receive a few dozen channels this way, unless you're in a place that's really remote, or really hilly.
It's not too late! The receivers are dirt cheap! You just need a dish! Ku band is fun to find feeds on if you only have a 3-4ft dish. I have a 10ft dish for C band and watch most of USA cable networks free! Encryption keys are available.
My family had one of these. You could watch pretty much anything you wanted. The biggest downside was the dish having to move every time you went to a new satellite. You always missed the beginning of the show/movie.
My dad had a friend in the 80's with one of these and a really nice AV setup. One day it took a direct lightning hit and fried almost everything.
I was a kid in the late 80s and 90s, we had a big ol satellite well into the 90s, but I grew up in the rural mountains of Western North Carolina and we had to get a descrambler. We had it long enough to where I clearly remember watching my first dirty movie on it, if you were lucky you could find such classy entertainment unscrambled. Those were good times.
Ahhhh yeah i remember those! Growing up a neighborhood friend of mine had one. Him and his family are hispanic and always had telemundo on at the house along with other spanish channels
When I was a kid I remember someone telling me that satellite dishes didn't have any commercials. I don't know if this is true, but I was told live broadcasts kept running and you could see what they where doing in the studio while the commercials run. For instance during Saturday Night Live you could see them getting ready for the next skit.
Its true commercials are added locally its still this way today if you watch some pirated tv chans on internet you can still get no commercials as they are getting their source directly from sat
i don't thin this is true because they could just cut the camera, i remember being all black in the commercials time.
@@vinizan It varies from program to program. Most will cut,.some will keeping in archives as Bloopers. Maybe make a Blooper DVD 📀
@@Keepskatin i know but every camera has a cut button, would be easy just to cut the camera in the commercia times
@@vinizan - It was true for some broadcasts but others would cut their signals during breaks, I recall several folks getting into trouble and feeding conspiracy theories with statements made during breaks thinking nobody outside the studio would see/hear it. Some conspiratards have edited old break clips to manipulate them for conspiracy theory nonsense too.
I once watched a U.S. politician crack a joke about dead children in Iraq on an uncut news feed(I want to say CNN but can't recall) on my uncle's dish in the early 90's - when the host leaned over and whispered something to him he looked right at the camera with a big "oh shit" look on his face finding out his comments may not be so private, lol.
Not sure if anything came from that but probably not, internet wasn't a big thing then so unless a news agency covered it on T.V. or newspapers most folks wouldn't know it happened.
I always enjoyed that stuff as you sometimes got to see the real people(for better or worse) instead of the characters/persona's they used in public.
The size of the dish is for signal gain (due to the lower power); it is the receivers and associated components at the focal point that determine the operating frequency. Good video!
My grandfather who lived in the mountains for a while had one of these. I assumed that he had to pay, I never asked him.
He had some kind of printed paper TV guide that was a lot more complicated than the ones I was used to reading. I guess different batches of channels were on different satellites and the dish would reorient itself. The one time I sat down and tried to use it he got angry at me for flipping channels without planning in advance what I wanted to watch which I guess was a rule in his house and was a rule for my mom growing up.
you can still do this today, most satellites have free-to-air channels and you only need one mini-dish per satellite. However, there are apps on Android TV which bundle these free channels, making dishes redundant.
lol I remember those dishes. I thought they were just for people that lived in rural areas where regular cable TV wasn't available.
This is great!! My grandparents had one of these big dishes in their back yard, and of course, it was hit by lightning and fried the Zenith TV. Good times. I feel old just saying that.
I was a teen back then. Those were the good old days. That was high tech back then but your right. The good old days!
My dad had one with the motorized option. I remember up until the early nineties getting unfettered access to HBO, Disney Channel, even weird channels that would just play every episode of a syndicated show all in a row without commercials. I watched many cartoons that way. It also had porno channels. At that point the pay per view channels were mostly scrambled and you needed a descrambler unit. As a kid i still remember some of the channel names that I liked to watch. For instance Disney channel was G-24. Good times. My intro to the world of piracy. It wasn't the last either .... ;D
I would guess those syndicated show marathons were for transmission to local stations that bought rights to rerun the show daily. I'd think they'd more likely send a batch of a week's worth of episodes at once, along with the promos for each episode, but maybe they'd do a whole run.
I remember Disney east and west moved around a bit, would stay on one spot for about 3-7 years, then move. I remember the satellite and transponder numbers after 1994... but not as much before. And I do remember the channels which were obviously pay per view, and trying to use the skew and minute adjustments to try and see it.... usually to no avail.
I recall seeing them on roof tops, and often in back yards and at the colleges (I attended) a few local TV stations as well, always thought they were cool...
A couple years ago I recycled a neighbor's dish for them, made about $40.
My grandpa had one. When I was real young I would wate for him to change chanels run out on his deck just to see it move.
Then as a teen it was really cool he could get like 15 different HBO channel's so much more than cable at our house, but the cable at the house was way better than the 3 Channel's we had before cable.
Also that big ass dish always got reception blizzard no problem. Little dish net work is out no mater the weather.
Reminds me of the 80's and watching Dr. Eugene Scott on C-Band! 😅
In my case, in answer to the titular question, trees grow up around and through them. I'd forgotten that it was there for about a decade. It took me half an hour hunting around in new growth cedars to find the remnants.
Satellite TV is alive and well for both C and Ku Band, if you're not interested in channels like HBO, ESPN, Discovery there are many Free To Air (FTA) channels available, all you need is a satellite receiver like GT Media or AMIKO, an actuator for your C Band dish and a new C-Band LNB, or for Ku Band you need a 100 cm dish, Ku-Band LNB and a USALS H-H motor. In Europe we use only Ku Band satellite dish is the solution for both cable and Over The Air TV newer TVs have a satellite tuner built and a CI+ Module for Pay TV cable and satellite channels you only get a CI Card to descramble the channels. Also you don't need rabbit ears or rooftop antenna, the channels that are available OTA (Over the Air) are also available on satellite. In Europe you don't have the problem that youlive in a rural area and your antenna doesn't receive a single channels, you mount an 80 - 100 cm dish and you have more than 200 channels. As for North America I recommend Robbie Strike and Northcoaster Hobby channels on RUclips for FTA satellite channels.
I have posted a list of English channels on #FreeSatelliteTV in the description of this video ruclips.net/video/Ll917-MXG9U/видео.html
Back in the eighties my parents had that 8-foot dish. Like you said they started scrambling stuff and also the L and B had I had to change out in the 90s to still receive. Since then my parents this place is gone and I have a suspicion that those satellites are still in function so if someone wanted to they could probably still get free channels
My grandparents had a massive black one in san diego. Us kids used to play around with it when it was no longer in use.
These were very common in Brazil until 10 years ago because the country is huge, but we used it for public television since a lot of cities the local public channels are few and don't have enough power to reach the whole city.
It died out when they switched public channels to digital because the equipment (available there) only allowed analog.
We still had the antenna in our house until 5 years ago, although it wasn't being used anymore, we used it until 2014 or so.
I think there were around 15-20 public channels.
Unencrypted C-band satellites were still common in the 2010s and is actually how some TV piracy groups in the US (LOL/DIMENSION) would get the shows released online while the credits were still rolling on broadcast television. They would record the shows earlier in the day when they were being distributed to affiliates, they didn't tend to release before the show had aired as not to tip their hand. These days however the quality of streaming/VOD is often far superior to the 720p or even 1080p C-band transmissions that these groups would capture so It isn't really worth it any more.
I recall grabbing a few shows I had missed recording, and they had actually been released BEFORE the broadcast in my area, sometimes days before. It may depend on content, as syndicated shows didn't have a fixed day/time the local channel needed to air it on. Also, I don't recall them actually hiding that these were C-band feeds at all.
@@marsilies The groups I named used to blur out the logo in the corner, but there wasn't actually any logo there to blur because the c-band transmissions didn't have them.
Sometimes shows would air in Canada before the US also, so that's how some groups got them a day or so early too.
Few things are still unencrypted, mostly just events. Some things are distributed via the internet also.
I still have a 10ft dish today. Picture quality is much better than the compressed streaming services. 1080i looks amazing straight from the source. I have encryption keys to watch most of the cable networks on C Band.
The large home satellite dishes were technically known back then as Television receive-only (TVRO) dishes but were nicknamed BUD (Big Ugly Dish). Their prevalence in mountainous regions of West Virginia in the 80's/early 90's had them also being sometimes nicknamed the "West Virginia state flower" by locals back then. Where I currently live, a more rural part of SoCal, I see them rusting away from time to time in peoples backyards. But back in the day they could be the only way rural folks could get Pay TV channels and maybe even the only way to get a decent over-the-air broadcast TV signals so as ugly and awkward as they seem to younger folks these days, remember this was the only good option for TV reception some people had at one time. You still see some of them in use these days but not for C-Band TV channel reception but rather as either a) modified to receive direct broadcast satellite (DBS) channels (The large dish illuminates the rain fade associated with smaller dishes) b) as dish-to-dish wireless data transmitters, and c) for other Radio transmitting applications.
I love the video although I found it a little creepy because I was thinking about this about a week ago. A couple of my friends had them when I was little growing up. Seeing this video pop up made me feel like somebody was reading my mind. Great video
My parents had one of the first ones from around 1980 at our old house that the previous owners had installed. It was already obsolete and no longer worked by the late 80s, and they never got to use it. This one was fiberglass and even bigger than most of the old C-band dishes that were big. They immediately started trying to get rid of it, but before they were able to do so, in a beyond bizarre occurrence, my dad accidently set part of it on fire when trying to kill a wasp nest on the back of it with gasoline.
I used to sell those at Radio Shack in Yakima when I worked there in the early 90s.
Words cannot describe how cool it was to have a satellite TV system in the mid to late 80s.
Did anyone try radio astronomy or amateur radio?