In the late 60s or early 70s, my father had installed a microwave transmitter on the new John Hancock Bldg. in Boston. The transmitter was for HBO. Well, he came home that evening and designed a receiving antenna from a coffee can, and designed and assembled a tuning cavity. And yes, we had received a signal from HBO on our television. It was somewhat grainy, but to us kids it was fun and magical. I miss my dad, as he had been involved in so many radio projects from the 50s through the 80s. Some of the work was for the USN, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (their Antartic Research vessel), but his favorite was the maintenance of equipment on the Nantucket Lightship before it was deactivated. I think it had to do with the ride out there on Coast Guard cruiser. RIP dad.
This video sure brought back some memories. All during the 80s I worked at a local TV station in a rural area. It was located at the end of the microwave tower chain. In fact the last hop to the station was a simple passive reflector billboard that we owned. In the summertime certain weather conditions created temp inversions and the microwave signal would fade in and out. We were so happy to get our first C-band satellite dish. It was a steerable 25 foot monster. Since there was only one satellite available to receive the signal from, there was a problem every spring and fall around the equinoxes. The satellite would directly line up with the sun for about a half hour everyday for several days in a row. This caused a signal drop out due to the radio noise from the sun. Trying to explain this to people was difficult so the quick excuse we gave was that it was due to sunspots.
I grew up in Labrador in the 70s, and I can attest to the revolution that was Anik. We were not covered by the microwave distribution networks. National news, sporting events, etc were recorded and flown in, sometimes for next day broadcasts, often for next week. With Anik, not everything was live, but time sensitive stuff like news was. And we got colour!
I grew up in Stephenville Newfoundland. In 1974 we got our 2nd "over the air channel". I vividly remember my father telling us kids;" I don't want you guys fighting over those 2 channels "!! Lol! Great memories. No satellite for us but we got cable in 1977 around the time that Elvis died. Another vivid memory.
In the late 1990s, we worked with a NASA ACTS satellite to experiment with telemedicine but found that the bandwidth limitations made medical (X-ray, etc) image sharing impractical (we had 150mb channels) along with the video conferencing that could enable real interactive collaboration. We had wonderful support from California State University, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and Cisco, however it needed the sort of commercial gigabit networks we have today to raise the effectiveness of telemedicine to the level of a utility that we use today. My mother had an emergency (3am) cat scan in Marin County that was evaluated by an radiologist in Austrailia who collaborated with the local ER to assess her condition. So telemedicine is wonderful but it took decades of government funded non-commercial research to make it routine.
In Austria in rural areas it was quite common to receive commercial TV via Satellite. Even in cities people would have satellite dishes because the immigrants wanted to see the TV from home (usually Turkey, etc.). A law was put in place that explicitly allowed everybody to have a satellite dish, until it grew so bad that every balcony had a satellite dish, and new buildings installed central dishes on top, with splitters and distribution cables. We never had the absurdly large dishes.
@@rybaluc Usually, though some systems are actually able to use passive splitters rather than PIN-diode based diseqc switches, if only one polarization from one orbital position is needed (just a few specific chanels), or (more recently) if hardware at or near the dishes' LNBF is able to frequency-shift and band-stack the various signals that would otherwise conflict. Of course this requires much better quality splitters than common terrestrial-broadcast ones, rated to for 2.5GHz or more, and able to pass DC backfed on at least one input to power the LNBF electronics. These make it more practical to support very large numbers of receivers, or multi-tuner boxes. Sometimes there's provision for a low-band (< 800MHz) Moca data channel too for receivers to communicate amongst themselves, share DVR storage & such. One US provider uses such a system
When I was a kid, quite a few people in my neighborhood had giant motorized satellite dishes in their back yard. I always thought they were pretty magical, but sadly my family was far too poor to afford one.
My first job out of college was installing these massive satellite dishes. I recall one neighbour leaning over the fence while I was putting one up and he was commenting on how ugly they were. I mentioned that most people regarded them as a status symbol, kinda joking. The next week I was installing one at his place.
I was fortunate to win one from a local high school raffle in 1984. I don't do it, but I know some amateur astronomers repurposed them to monitor meteors (they can be "seen" in the daylight using a dish by how their trails ionize the gases for a few seconds). Then I know a few who took them down but used the dish as the top for a gazebo in their yards. The issue of course is that it all has changed. Everything is encrypted now. Back in those days nothing was. There were lot of "wild" feeds.
I just recently watched a video about old US sattelites that still work, and still rebroadcast signals unencrypted. So there are still space pirates out there, using old space hardware to rebroadcast their signals far across the globe. Im kind of interested in starting to monitor these old things myself, to see whats really out there
I taught in a little, rural school. I put out a call to parents for an unused, large sat dish. My class and I covered it in silvered mylar and we aimed it at the sun. During assembly, a section inadvertantly focused on my calf, wow, was hot. We put all kinds of stuff in the focus and melted aluminun, we did (900F). Put a styrafoam coffee cup at focus and nothing happened. I wrote kids name in black magic marker and burned their names into the cups, demonstrating absorbtion..
I remember in the 80s when my father-in-law got one of those big dishes. It was awesome at the time as you could get HBO, Showtime, etc. without a subscription. He could also get the local Dallas Cowboy games, since the games were locally blacked out at the time but were broadcast to people in the US military that were deployed overseas. I remember watching those football games and when a local TV commercial would normally come on, the satellite feed didn't carry it and you could hear the broadcasters talking about stuff that wasn't being broadcast "on regular TV". It was cool times for sure. Then... when HBO and other companies realized how much revenue they were missing out on, they started scrambling the signal, essentially rendering my father in law's system useless. I think he paid something like $4K for the system back in the 80's - which was a lot of money. He probably would have been better off just paying for the cable subscription fees 😆
There were “hacked” General Instruments VideoCipher 2 Descramblers that could restore the scrambled signals of a legit descrambler and a subscription could be done as well.
I just watched a documentary on the South Atlantic anomaly in regards to satellite reliability, bit flipping and radiation. Might make for a interesting future episode.
Sounds like something to do with the earth's magnetic field. It would be interesting to see if it has something to do with that massive ecological killer meteroid that struck down in that area millions of years ago.
@@JosephAratait’s a completely different area; the asteroid hit around what is now the Yucatán peninsula (gulf of Mexico); the anomaly is centered on Uruguay/Argentina and extending southeast.
The engineer knows that having surplus capacity can be useful, to absorb the sloshes from moving the glass around for instance, or to account for the water already consumed. Thus the engineer might not say its twice the capacity, maybe its just 60% too much capacity
Ahh, great memories! I was working as a satellite network engineer with United Video Inc. (common carrier for WGN, KTVT, KTLA, WPIX superstations) at the time of the Captain Midnight incident. Since there were only a few teleports across the US at the time with 10 meter uplink dishes capable of taking over the HBO transmission (like our Chicago Int'l Teleport for WGN) the FBI scheduled interviews with all of our teleport staff on duty during the HBO takeover incident. There was no easy way to tell what teleport in which part of the country was responsible for the "pirate" transmission. Trivia: They ended up catching the "Captain Midnight" teleport operator in Florida because of the font used in the character generator to send the message. No other teleport had equipment with that font!
I find it amazing that a character who is clever enough to pirate the signal in the first place, and then hijack the broadcast later, wouldn't expect to get busted. As you point out, it's hardly the kind of common equipment that just anybody would have, which quickly narrows the list of potential suspects.
@@johnladuke6475The guy should have pointed a camera at a homemade typewriter written note on a sheet, or better yet made in crayon, ala "ransom" note style. That way nothing would have been traceable to any particular equipment. He could easily have made it ahead of time, put it on video tape, play it back when the time came, and then taken the evidence home and tossed away. I remember hearing about Captain Midnight; a classmate back then had one of those Big Ugly Dishes, or BUD's in their backyard. His parents reluctantly got the Videocipher decoder and got the special "mod" to have everything come in the clear. It worked for a few years tell Videocipher II scrambling that used digital audio, so you could see the video but not hear anything if you didn't have the newer Videocipher II decoder. Listening to Videocipher II digital audio on a good home theater systems was very impressive. So if you were willing to pay for the service, you did get the benefit of some fantastic digital audio encoded with Dolby Pro Logic on HBO and Showtime etc.
I think another point of evidence was that he had done a very brief (1 second or so) test hijacking of HBO's transponder one week prior, just sending color-bars but no text to see whether it would work. So, investigators were able to look at staff logs to check which teleport might have had the same person on duty alone for both incidents
@@marcusdamberger The DES-encrypted Videocipher II audio was sent as little white dots in the horizontal blanking interval of each video scanline, if I remember correctly. Kind of like how closed captioning data was hidden in the vertical blanking over terrestrial broadcast, but of course at a much higher bitrate. This in itself would have been enough to mess up the sync recovery of a normal receiver, but since they were scrambling that too, the decoder box could use other embedded timing to insert its own clean sync pulses.
Ahh this takes me back. My brother in law had a C band antennae in the 80s and 90s. He used it to get the usual early look at network TV shows when they were distributed, but his favorite was the raw satellite news feeds that would show up. These would be spliced down and edited for content for the nightly news. Most of it was boring, but some of that stuff was horrifying - gruesome.
I used to catch those feeds on open transponders, but all I ever saw was the boring stuff. Never anything gruesome or exciting. Usually just some location reporter waiting for their cue, looking bored and chatting with the camera crew. If you waited long enough, someone would count them in and they'd put on their game face and give a report. Then the studio would ask questions we couldn't hear, and you'd see them respond.
Back in the early 90's I was given a 10 foot dish. I reassembled it on top of grandma & grandpa's house and used a sewer pipe vent to support it. Also had to use guy wires for stabilization. The main goal was to receive the NASA feed, being on the west coast I had to aim the dish at lowest possible point in the sky. I did not have a screw jack so this was all done by hand. But it was well worth it. I would watch the live feed for hours every day, soaking it all in.
I remember having both a Sky dish and BSB squarial on the side of my house back in early 90s. The Sky dish was erected whilst it was snowing and the installer said the picture would improve when the snow stopped 😂
My father used to install the modern 18-inch dishes in a snow-heavy area, and we definitely found that snow had an effect. Not on the signal itself coming in... but from accumulating snow changing the curvature of the dish, throwing it off the focus point. He always advised customers to install them within arm's reach of the ground or a window if possible, and keep a snow brush handy. Sounds crazy, but brush-brush-brush and the picture comes back.
My grandparents actually got scammed by investing in a company trying to sell satellite signal scrambler technology to broadcasters in the 1980s haha. They also had a huge motorized C-band dish all the way into the mid/late 90s. I used to go and change satellites on the TV receiver and watch the dish change azimuth and elevation to point to a different bird in GEO. No wonder I ended up working in space comms when I got old!
I remember in my early teens my parents getting a SKY decoder. After they went to bed I used to tune into RTL, because I'd heard it showed porn. After waiting an age for the signal to de-scramble all I got was Marty Feldman dubbed into German. Occasionally I'd see a bit of hairy muff 70's soft core and that was enough for me. You never got that on the BBC. Science and technology is amazing.
That's funny about Star trek... I remember ding the same thing, taping DS9 from paramount's direct-to-station downlink (no encryption back then). And watching the interview setups on news shows, the local Los Angeles NBC station was uplinked before the Tonight Show came on (hello Susan, you were probably switching at MC what I was watching on the dish in Chico...) good times, good times... :)
When I was a teenager, my next door neighbor was an electrical engineer who played with ham radio. He had built his own dish that he called a “chicken wire” dish. When channels started being scrambled, he figured out that the code was only 8 bits. He used an 8 bit dip switch and cycled through all 256 possible combinations until he found the correct combination. He eventually built an automated circuit to do it for him. I moved away, but several years later I met him on the street. He told me the channels had moved from simple scrambling to actual encryption. I didn’t understand the difference at the time, but I learned. Hanging out in his garage and watching him work led to my career in programming PLC/HMI’s for automated manufacturing.
Satellite TV accounts were not available in Canada because those networks did not have Canadian licenses, and the Canadian government refused to allow their sale. Since they were not available, the Canadian government would not go after pirates nor would extradite them, so there actually was a market for private bounty hunters that would go kidnap pirates and bring them to the US...
When i was a teenager in Wyoming, we paid for cable TV in town, but some of my classmates lived out on ranches where there was no service. Some said having television was like listening to radio with snow on the screen. If there was oil or coal mining on your land, you could afford an $8,000 to $12,000 satellite dish receiver system and watch movies out on the ranch. At that time, a dish was about 4 meters and fixed in place on one satellite.
Ha, I also remember watching STTNG days before anyone else could! Babylon 5 was distributed on a non-scrambled satellite channel too. My house was in a valley with no line-of-sight to the TV broadcast towers, so in the late 80s it was satellite TV or VHS tapes.
11:50 It just struck me how crazy the physics is of that: 2.5deg beam width, and it covers a good portion of the earth, and that "little" satellite sends out enough RF energy "photons" so that you just need a small dish to collect and focus them into a usable and pretty high bandwidth signal.
Yeah, the size of modern dishes is incredible. The signal must be so miniscule when received. Microwatts of power? Every once in a while when you drive around a rural area you can spot one of the old ground mount 3 or 4 meter satellite dishes still left in someone's yard... If those were for satellite TV back in the day, it's amazing how far technology has advanced.... And how awesome that must have felt at the time to use a dish to get signal.
@@volvo09 About 1 million times less than microwatts, assuming 1kW transmitter over the area of earth and receiving antenna 1 m2 then signal power is 2 picowatts
@@kiiverkk wow, that is such a tiny number! It's amazing it can even be picked up... Makes me wonder how weak the signal from voyager 2 is now. That is hard to get with massive satellite arrays...
GPS is even more amazing. Not that high of a bandwidth, but your phone has a small antenna going in every direction in a car and still has reception. That's femtowatts, and your phone basically receives only noise. Hardware wise and Software wise a tour de force just for the way to the bakery and back.
Back in the early 80s I worked for a small technology company in Toronto that designed satellite receivers for Scientific Atlanta and Philips among others. We had an antenna in the front of our office in downtown Toronto and a small herd of them on the roof of the renovated home we worked in on Prince Arthur Avenue. some of the unedited cable feeds we used to get on our test bench were pretty wild…
I remember as a kid sitting in front of our tiny CRT TV, black and white noise during bad weather, and then TV signal again, briefly displaying the text ASTRA. And today I haven't watched TV for over a decade because the annoying ads ruined it.
As a nerd tech at Motorola, a few of us were really into the satellite craze in the early 70's and 80's, and one of the "perks" on those 10' dishes was being able to receive and watch West Coast shows, like Johnny Carson, live, as they shot the show earlier and sent it to NYC for re-broadcast at 11PM. It usually included bloopers that would be later edited out. The cost back then for a 10' dish and the needed expensive cabling needed was about $2000. Loved those days!
Scott, a fascinating story you may want to look into is the amateur radio satellites. Hams have been designing, building, and using satellites since 1961, when OSCAR 1 was launched. Several of the spacecraft were built but only one was launched. One of the spares resides at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Project OSCAR got its start in 1959 when Donald Stoner (W6TNS) famously asked if anyone had a spare rocket. Two years later, history was made.
Grin, thx for the memories. Im 84 and back then this was the leading breaking stuff that was bigger than most people realized. I became a teckie at this point and never looked back but only forward. To this day i am hooked on the latest and most unique technologies available. I can wait for what we will get woth StarShip. The day the stock goes public you know ill have been standing in a long line days before....... Really enjoyed this one. 👍👀
Yeah I remember reading about the ATS-6 transmissions to India and that they were being received by hobbyists, back when that occurred. Also I had a receiver for the Astra satellites, but not particularly early (I think it must have been in 1994, by then there already were 4 Astra satellites, 64 analog programmes). There was a lot to receive for the hobbyist back then, that has decreased a lot. Much of the use of satellites for TV programme distribution has been replaced by fiber and the internet.
My first satellite dish was from an electronics flea market where someone selling generic Ku band dishes for satellite TV reception and a LNR with it. Another was selling generic STV tuners. There are websites that list free satellite TV stations, though mostly foreign and religious channels (and many looked like HSN and QVC). While the content was boring but I actually did my first reception from spacecraft in the Clarke Belt. Though the day I first got my system going was the day Arthur C. Clarke died.
I loved satellite tv in the 1990's, analogue s band, c band, and extended ku band, a stack of decoders for Filmnet and tv1000 and others, had a 2 meter dish with a motorised az el mount with inclinded orbit capability and a clear view from 70 east to 70 west here in the south of the UK. it all got boring when digital tv started
I believe the very first private satellite commlink station was Arthur C. Clarke's system, installed by his publisher so he could work without leaving his home in Sri Lanka. Poetic, in a way. It was used almost exclusively for email and straight text based manuscript files.
I can remember installing satelite dishes 1978 through 1984 for friends who could afford it..and it was a blast picking up programs like HBO...and sports events.but sadly the free stuff went away very quickly and you had to subscribe for channels... Great memories.. Thanks for a great video... ❤
When we had a large C band satellite dish I enjoyed tuning it to the obscure satellites and watching programming from other countries. Our system had the ability to be manually tuned, so it was nice to find a satellite that wasn’t listed or commonly programmed. Also I remember seeing the captain midnight HBO message when it happened.
Loved my 12' dish in the 1980s. I first got NASA Select TV through it (and "free" HBO, Showtime, etc., plus raw feeds of the political TV talk shows of the times). It was a very good time in communications history. And we could buy just the channels we actually wanted to watch back then. Imagine that. Crazy thing was twice a year waiting for the sun to get out of the way behind a satellite so you could receive it. Loved NASA Select before the PR guys and gals took over and it was more "raw" than today. I know, I know, they have to make it for the masses, but back then for space nerds it was great.
I was only a kid for the tail end of big dishes in the 90s, but ohhh do I miss the idea of just getting the channel you actually wanted instead of a "package" of unrelated junk. I also miss how TLC, A&E, History, Discovery, all used to have _educational_ shows instead of mind-rotting garbage.
@@johnladuke6475sadly, it seems all those channels that were great have been in a race to the bottom to capture ratings. TV has indeed returned to being a "great wasteland" with most content written on a 6th grade level, if even that. Or its all-derivative drivel. I rarely watch anything fictional at all anymore.
@@rosswarren436Same. I’ll watch the tube when my wife wants to watch something, but normally I just watch docs, YT videos like Scotts, or read. Today’s fictional is just terrible.
If I remember correctly in the 1980s you could buy pirated descrambler key cards for receivers to access scrambled stations since legal access wasn't generally available in Canada. But they would only last till the keys were changed and people would have to find the next ones. Eventually legal alternatives were more widely available so people gave up on the hassles. Plus the dishes got a lot smaller which was more practical.
Reminds me of the pirate cards available in the uk to unscramble sky tv. The one I had let you copy someone elses card and every few months you would have to sneak a copy of an updated card when they changed the keys. Eventually sky cottoned on to this and messed around with the memory on their cards making it uncopyable on the one I had. Later ones let you reflash the card via a serial cable providing you could find the images on some dodgy ftp site. I also had another card that unscrambled mainland european channels that used nagravision encryption. Swinging the dish to point towards the Eutelsat constellation also netted you unscrambled versions of things like mtv and a few `adult` offerings . Browsing the many many different teletext systems from around europe was fun as well.
I'm often blown away by factoids in your videos Scott, but fluorine-hydrogen?! I had to look into it. Wikipedia's Tripropellant Rocket page says: "In the 1960s, Rocketdyne fired an engine using a mixture of liquid lithium, gaseous hydrogen, and liquid fluorine to produce a specific impulse of 542 seconds, likely the highest measured such value for a chemical rocket motor." Tripropellant rockets! I've been subscribed to you forever, but can't recall you touching on this topic. The wiki article goes on to talk about how tripropellant engines have been considered for SSTO's, as in those engines, the ratio of different fuels changes as it flies. As an Alaskan, hearing about ATS-1's telemedicine trials up here is next on my list to look into. Anyway, fascinating stuff, thanks as always!
I setup a 1.3 mt in 1992 in north Italy, with horizon horizon rotor i could receive from Tokio to 🇺🇸 with a EchoStar 5500, then digital Topfield. It's still perfect today, directly connected to a TV set, after millions of motor spins
In the 90s and early 00s here in Aus, you'd get dodgy dish installations with a hacked genuine Austar box to unscramble it. But after a while Austar would periodically change presumably the algorithm to stop such installs from working.
I assume the adoption of digital satellite transmission eventually greatly increased the TV satellite performance (or decreased their size and cost) because of digital compression algorithms like MPEG-2, which reduced the required data stream to a small fraction of the uncompressed one. Of course, it would take a while till such video codecs were invented.
Your mention of the TWT amplifier tube reminded me of something I've always wondered about. Have any vacuum tubes (TWT or otherwise) ever flown into orbit without that pesky envelope to maintain the vacuum? Seems like a chance for mass savings and possible new degrees of freedom when designing these components. Sure, makes checkout on the ground harder..
Traveling Wave Tubes went away as Solid State started getting into the Ghz world, cheaply enough, and a lot more compact than the plumbing style layout of waveguides. I miss them. 😁 Vacuum Tubes are slightly mis-named, as even though they can be long and cylindrical looking, they are Vacuum Bulbs. The cylindrical part is there to focus the electrons from the heater (or light) to the various grids in a row, on to a plate, and take up minimal footprint, but the bulb could be done in any shape as long as the heater/grid(s)/plate spacial relationship is maintained. As far as whether they could be used 'naked' in space, IIRC, the 'vacuum of space' is a relative term the closer you get to the planets what with traces of atmosphere and major amounts of dust floating around, a vacuum tube has a much better environment with controlled Vacuum and as an enclosed container, no dust collecting to energized circuits.
@@paulholmes672 I was thinking of the vacuum tubes I played around with at the amateur radio club in college. We had built a VHF amplifier with a 4CX250 tube, which was mostly a metallic and ceramic shell with fins and forced air cooling. And I recall, used some Beryllium material as part of the "envelope" because it had a compatible thermal coefficient of expansion.. but don't inhale any dust! There was another amplifier with some 4-400A tubes, a real glass envelope and all. And quite the warm glow from the filament! I suppose I was thinking of either of those two devices and potential simplifications of the mechanical aspects. I didn't know that TWT devices were not under vacuum..
As a kid in the 1990's, I remember all those ads for satellite dishes and descramblers at the back of magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics.
I was in Resolute Bay, Northwest Territories (75°N) the summer that the huge dish was installed to receive broadcasts from Annik. It was a really big deal.
I am sad Bob Cooper's name did not come up in this video. I would throw out a couple of things. First, while the US was late to the DTH market; they were the first to go with digital compressions allowing a lot more channels per transponder. Also, I believe that that North America had a different allocations, with half of KU banding being lower power with 2 degree spacing and then higher power DBS with 9 degree spacing. Also, technically PrimeStar was the first Direct to Home offering before DirecTV and Dish on rented satellite capacity. I have been meaning to go down the rabbit hole a c-band satellite hacking from the 1980's.
The first house I bought in 1995 could not have cable, and being out in the boondocks the only best choice was a C-band satellite dish. We enjoyed that until we moved in 2003.
I remember my dad picking up the Dish Network 18" dish and recever package from Costco in 97 or 98? We mounted it to the house and he adjusted the dish slightly until the signal from EchoStar 1 was in the green zone. It was pretty awesome coming from an antenna that only got the local NY and CT news channels.
At 15:44, I recall an episode of “The Big Bang Theory” where the guys went into the California desert to camp and Howard used something similar to “tap into the East Coast feed” of some provider.
The house we lived in in the '90s had a 12' diameter motorized dish in the backyard. We didn't have a descrambler, but I figured out how to watch several channels. Mostly just watching broadcast NBC or whatever at different times than they were aired locally. The controller didn't save any azimuth or bearing information, though, so we had to do it by trial and error. It was fun aiming the dish around, though.
A house I lived in 20 years ago, had a huge old freestanding satellite dish in the backyard. I didn't really understand why it was so large when most satellite dishes were like a quarter the diameter and were mounted on the sides of people's homes including the one the house actually used at that time. It was likely one of those old homemade satellite dishes though.
Not necessarily homemade. When I visited my brother in Canada in the late 1980s in his (then) new house, lots of his neighbours in this new development had large, ground mounted steerable dishes in their back gardens, often with neat little white fences round them to keep children, pets and wildlife out. I remember walking down the road one evening and hearing several of the dishes start to move (motors whirring) as some popular TV show on a different satellite had several of households retuning. My brother and his family weren't big TV viewers so didn't have one, nor at the time cable TV. I did rig up a rather large homemade Yagi in the back garden so that I could watch Benny Hill deep fringed from over the border in the USA, but that was terrestrial transmissions. ;-)
The reason they were so big is because the power output on satellites wasn't as high as they are now. Otherwise it would have shortened the lifespan of the satellite substantially.
In 1986, I had a 2.5m dish to receive transponders from Eutelsat F1, including channels like Sky Channel, Music Box, and so on. Cable TV wasn't available yet where I lived in the countryside. I was the only one in the village with satellite TV.
For future thumbnail creation, consider avoiding long, red, horizontal line elements (such as the red arrow in this video's thumbnail). I saw this video's thumbnail 4 times before I clicked on it in my feed; each time I didn't watch it was because I mistakenly thought that RUclips was showing that I'd already watched most of it (since their play-timeline indicator is a also horizontal, red bar).
I remember in the days of the large dishes that there was a guide book that listed what shows were going to be on what satellite and channel, much like TV Guide for OTA & cable. It was thick, compared to TV Guide, because of all the additional channels that could be picked up compared to OTA & cable.
The old "Big Ugly Dishes" (BUDs) are still very much in demand for amateur-radio satellite enthusiasts, and EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) enthusiasts. Myself, I'm involved in a project to restore a former-NATO satellite ground terminal (built in 1971) for use in radio astronomy and amateur EME efforts. I'd previously been involved in a project to restore an 18m dish that was used in early Canadian satellite projects--Alouette and Isis satellites--although those were science satellites, rather than comms satellites.
Was it you who sold the geodesic dome to "saveitforparts"? He bought one from Canada from the Diefenbunker, outside Ottawa, who are restoring an old NATO satellite ground station for radio astronomy. If you don't know of Gabe and the saveitforparts channel, look him up, he has some videos on the facility.
I had a C band dish in 1981. It was a home made affair consisting of a 10 foot spun aluminum dish from an old microwave site. My first receiver was a cheap pll receiver. later on. I got a better receiver and eventually had to subscribe using a videocipher descrambler. I also installed C band at the hospitals I worked for as many medical seminars were belng delivered using the descrambler used by Canadian TV providers and some porn companies.
In the early 1980s I lived and worked on Bougainville Island where the town was built and serviced by the giant copper and gold mine. The community built an Intelsat receiving station including a big dish and a cable TV distribution system for the whole town of 7,000 houses. That meant many weekends of work for us all, most not knowing the detailed technical side. But it worked and brought the world to our very remote community.
I had a 10 foot dish with an STS positioner and receiver that worked really well. I loved watching CBC shows and even some from Mexico. During the first Gulf war, I could get he live feeds from the gulf as they were relayed back to the states. HBO and Showtime scrambled their channel;s and eventually virtually all channels were encrypted and not available. I always enjoyed surfing around to all the satellites to see what was being broadcast, but alas, no more.
I remember a neighbor up the street had one of those giant dishes AND was a HAM operator. The home had a giant dish on the roof and in the back yard, there were 2-3 antenna off to the side, and their car looked out of MASH but covered in 3-4 different radio antenna + a small dish. Meanwhile, the rest of the neighborhood had cable.
Either Scott wrote the script for this video a long time ago and had forgotten about the "fluorine/hydrogen upper stage" or he should look at getting into acting. Because I felt that in my soul.
Interesting, I thought the US would have had commercial sat service way before that. I guess the cable company's have had a choke hold for a while. makes sense that places like Canada and Australia rolled it out to service the huge swaths of land without cables. I remember our primary school getting a dish installed in the early/mid 90's for various educational shows, but there were a few kids that had satellite at home. that many TV stations was inconceivable at the time. there were 2 free to air channels, I think sat had 12?
If memory serves, I think most of the C-Band satellites back then had 24 channels. 12 were vertically polarized and 12 were horizontally polarized. We would push a button to make a small piece of metal in the feed horn rotate to whichever set of channels we wanted to watch.
The US cable TV industry started early, with "community antenna" systems in the late 1940s and 1950s. Basically, many rural areas couldn't get over-the-air TV, even with a big roof antenna -- either due to sheer distance, or to hills/mountains/valley walls in the way. So near towns in such areas, someone would build a really _big_ antenna and wire homes and businesses up to it for a monthly fee.* Sometimes these antennas could pick up stations from multiple nearby cities, and many systems added their own primitive news and weather channels** -- along with public- and community-access channels -- to otherwise-empty channels on their service. In the 1970s, dedicated cable channels like HBO started appearing on these systems, and larger cable companies started forming through mergers and acquisitions of local systems. By the 1980s, there were enough cable channels for cable TV to roll out in the major cities too. * My dad's aunt subscribed to one of these when Dad was growing up. Her town was in a deep river valley, which blocked signals from _two_ sorta-nearby larger towns. So it was pretty much the only way to get TV there at the time. ** Text of headlines and/or stories from wire services. Or a feed of National Weather Service forecasts, plus a camera pointed at temperature, humidity, wind, etc dials for current conditions.
I was buying/building DTH satellite systems in the UK (mainly based on Pace brand products) in the 1980s and needed a 1.2M+ dish to get a decent number of satellites on a motorised system. Now you can get away with an 80cm dish for the same signal quality. That's 1.13m^2 reduced to 0.5m^2..... over 50% reduction in area. Almost all of that reduction has been made possible by the performance of LNBs, in those days a 1.3db loss LNB cost a fortune, now they are 0.3/0.4db and cost a few quid.
In the late 60s or early 70s, my father had installed a microwave transmitter on the new John Hancock Bldg. in Boston. The transmitter was for HBO. Well, he came home that evening and designed a receiving antenna from a coffee can, and designed and assembled a tuning cavity. And yes, we had received a signal from HBO on our television. It was somewhat grainy, but to us kids it was fun and magical.
I miss my dad, as he had been involved in so many radio projects from the 50s through the 80s. Some of the work was for the USN, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (their Antartic Research vessel), but his favorite was the maintenance of equipment on the Nantucket Lightship before it was deactivated. I think it had to do with the ride out there on Coast Guard cruiser. RIP dad.
>Coffee can
>grainy
hah! good one
I hope this series continues into the digital realm, with early satellite phones and internet in particular
This video sure brought back some memories. All during the 80s I worked at a local TV station in a rural area. It was located at the end of the microwave tower chain. In fact the last hop to the station was a simple passive reflector billboard that we owned. In the summertime certain weather conditions created temp inversions and the microwave signal would fade in and out. We were so happy to get our first C-band satellite dish. It was a steerable 25 foot monster. Since there was only one satellite available to receive the signal from, there was a problem every spring and fall around the equinoxes. The satellite would directly line up with the sun for about a half hour everyday for several days in a row. This caused a signal drop out due to the radio noise from the sun. Trying to explain this to people was difficult so the quick excuse we gave was that it was due to sunspots.
I would have thought the sun lining up directly with the sun explanation is easier for ordinary people to understand than sunspots.
I grew up in Labrador in the 70s, and I can attest to the revolution that was Anik. We were not covered by the microwave distribution networks. National news, sporting events, etc were recorded and flown in, sometimes for next day broadcasts, often for next week. With Anik, not everything was live, but time sensitive stuff like news was. And we got colour!
You grew up inside a dog, and it had satellite TV 🤔 Sounds like a crazy cOnSpIracY ThEOrY
@@MattyEngland It gets worse... I was born on the island of Newfoundland so pick a dog!
@@DavesRocketShop lmao
I grew up in Stephenville Newfoundland. In 1974 we got our 2nd "over the air channel". I vividly remember my father telling us kids;" I don't want you guys fighting over those 2 channels "!! Lol! Great memories. No satellite for us but we got cable in 1977 around the time that Elvis died. Another vivid memory.
In the late 1990s, we worked with a NASA ACTS satellite to experiment with telemedicine but found that the bandwidth limitations made medical (X-ray, etc) image sharing impractical (we had 150mb channels) along with the video conferencing that could enable real interactive collaboration. We had wonderful support from California State University, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and Cisco, however it needed the sort of commercial gigabit networks we have today to raise the effectiveness of telemedicine to the level of a utility that we use today. My mother had an emergency (3am) cat scan in Marin County that was evaluated by an radiologist in Austrailia who collaborated with the local ER to assess her condition. So telemedicine is wonderful but it took decades of government funded non-commercial research to make it routine.
millibit?
In Austria in rural areas it was quite common to receive commercial TV via Satellite. Even in cities people would have satellite dishes because the immigrants wanted to see the TV from home (usually Turkey, etc.). A law was put in place that explicitly allowed everybody to have a satellite dish, until it grew so bad that every balcony had a satellite dish, and new buildings installed central dishes on top, with splitters and distribution cables. We never had the absurdly large dishes.
"Splitter" is called multiswitch. Not that anyone cares :-)
@@rybaluc Usually, though some systems are actually able to use passive splitters rather than PIN-diode based diseqc switches, if only one polarization from one orbital position is needed (just a few specific chanels), or (more recently) if hardware at or near the dishes' LNBF is able to frequency-shift and band-stack the various signals that would otherwise conflict. Of course this requires much better quality splitters than common terrestrial-broadcast ones, rated to for 2.5GHz or more, and able to pass DC backfed on at least one input to power the LNBF electronics. These make it more practical to support very large numbers of receivers, or multi-tuner boxes. Sometimes there's provision for a low-band (< 800MHz) Moca data channel too for receivers to communicate amongst themselves, share DVR storage & such. One US provider uses such a system
When I was a kid, quite a few people in my neighborhood had giant motorized satellite dishes in their back yard. I always thought they were pretty magical, but sadly my family was far too poor to afford one.
My first job out of college was installing these massive satellite dishes. I recall one neighbour leaning over the fence while I was putting one up and he was commenting on how ugly they were. I mentioned that most people regarded them as a status symbol, kinda joking. The next week I was installing one at his place.
I believe those dishes were nicknamed BUDs (big ugly dishes)....so that tracks...
I was fortunate to win one from a local high school raffle in 1984. I don't do it, but I know some amateur astronomers repurposed them to monitor meteors (they can be "seen" in the daylight using a dish by how their trails ionize the gases for a few seconds). Then I know a few who took them down but used the dish as the top for a gazebo in their yards. The issue of course is that it all has changed. Everything is encrypted now. Back in those days nothing was. There were lot of "wild" feeds.
I just recently watched a video about old US sattelites that still work, and still rebroadcast signals unencrypted. So there are still space pirates out there, using old space hardware to rebroadcast their signals far across the globe.
Im kind of interested in starting to monitor these old things myself, to see whats really out there
Was 1st base on the whiffle ball field we pretended to have I ln the back yard
I taught in a little, rural school. I put out a call to parents for an unused, large sat dish. My class and I covered it in silvered mylar and we aimed it at the sun. During assembly, a section inadvertantly focused on my calf, wow, was hot. We put all kinds of stuff in the focus and melted aluminun, we did (900F). Put a styrafoam coffee cup at focus and nothing happened. I wrote kids name in black magic marker and burned their names into the cups, demonstrating absorbtion..
I remember in the 80s when my father-in-law got one of those big dishes. It was awesome at the time as you could get HBO, Showtime, etc. without a subscription. He could also get the local Dallas Cowboy games, since the games were locally blacked out at the time but were broadcast to people in the US military that were deployed overseas. I remember watching those football games and when a local TV commercial would normally come on, the satellite feed didn't carry it and you could hear the broadcasters talking about stuff that wasn't being broadcast "on regular TV". It was cool times for sure. Then... when HBO and other companies realized how much revenue they were missing out on, they started scrambling the signal, essentially rendering my father in law's system useless. I think he paid something like $4K for the system back in the 80's - which was a lot of money. He probably would have been better off just paying for the cable subscription fees 😆
There were “hacked” General Instruments VideoCipher 2 Descramblers that could restore the scrambled signals of a legit descrambler and a subscription could be done as well.
I just watched a documentary on the South Atlantic anomaly in regards to satellite reliability, bit flipping and radiation. Might make for a interesting future episode.
He already has a video about it
Sounds like something to do with the earth's magnetic field. It would be interesting to see if it has something to do with that massive ecological killer meteroid that struck down in that area millions of years ago.
Do you remember what the documentary was called / where it was? Sounds interesting.
@@JosephAratait’s a completely different area; the asteroid hit around what is now the Yucatán peninsula (gulf of Mexico); the anomaly is centered on Uruguay/Argentina and extending southeast.
Link please?
The optimist says the glass is half full, the pessimist says its half empty
The engineer says the glass has twice the capacity it needs
Physicists say what's on Scott's shirt: the glass is full, 50% air and 50% water.
Analyist says glass has 200% duty rating
@@PlataxJazz You mean 39% nitrogen 43.8% oxygen 16.7% hydrogen with 0.5% trace elements
The engineer knows that having surplus capacity can be useful, to absorb the sloshes from moving the glass around for instance, or to account for the water already consumed. Thus the engineer might not say its twice the capacity, maybe its just 60% too much capacity
@@robbszwarc Might want to check your sources on those percentages.
Ahh, great memories! I was working as a satellite network engineer with United Video Inc. (common carrier for WGN, KTVT, KTLA, WPIX superstations) at the time of the Captain Midnight incident. Since there were only a few teleports across the US at the time with 10 meter uplink dishes capable of taking over the HBO transmission (like our Chicago Int'l Teleport for WGN) the FBI scheduled interviews with all of our teleport staff on duty during the HBO takeover incident. There was no easy way to tell what teleport in which part of the country was responsible for the "pirate" transmission.
Trivia: They ended up catching the "Captain Midnight" teleport operator in Florida because of the font used in the character generator to send the message. No other teleport had equipment with that font!
I find it amazing that a character who is clever enough to pirate the signal in the first place, and then hijack the broadcast later, wouldn't expect to get busted. As you point out, it's hardly the kind of common equipment that just anybody would have, which quickly narrows the list of potential suspects.
@@johnladuke6475The guy should have pointed a camera at a homemade typewriter written note on a sheet, or better yet made in crayon, ala "ransom" note style. That way nothing would have been traceable to any particular equipment. He could easily have made it ahead of time, put it on video tape, play it back when the time came, and then taken the evidence home and tossed away.
I remember hearing about Captain Midnight; a classmate back then had one of those Big Ugly Dishes, or BUD's in their backyard. His parents reluctantly got the Videocipher decoder and got the special "mod" to have everything come in the clear. It worked for a few years tell Videocipher II scrambling that used digital audio, so you could see the video but not hear anything if you didn't have the newer Videocipher II decoder. Listening to Videocipher II digital audio on a good home theater systems was very impressive. So if you were willing to pay for the service, you did get the benefit of some fantastic digital audio encoded with Dolby Pro Logic on HBO and Showtime etc.
I think another point of evidence was that he had done a very brief (1 second or so) test hijacking of HBO's transponder one week prior, just sending color-bars but no text to see whether it would work. So, investigators were able to look at staff logs to check which teleport might have had the same person on duty alone for both incidents
@@marcusdamberger The DES-encrypted Videocipher II audio was sent as little white dots in the horizontal blanking interval of each video scanline, if I remember correctly. Kind of like how closed captioning data was hidden in the vertical blanking over terrestrial broadcast, but of course at a much higher bitrate. This in itself would have been enough to mess up the sync recovery of a normal receiver, but since they were scrambling that too, the decoder box could use other embedded timing to insert its own clean sync pulses.
Ahh this takes me back. My brother in law had a C band antennae in the 80s and 90s. He used it to get the usual early look at network TV shows when they were distributed, but his favorite was the raw satellite news feeds that would show up. These would be spliced down and edited for content for the nightly news. Most of it was boring, but some of that stuff was horrifying - gruesome.
I heard that you could see Peter Jennings eating a sandwich during commercials.
That sounds horrifying
Same. My dad did the same. Simpsons before everyone else!
I used to catch those feeds on open transponders, but all I ever saw was the boring stuff. Never anything gruesome or exciting. Usually just some location reporter waiting for their cue, looking bored and chatting with the camera crew. If you waited long enough, someone would count them in and they'd put on their game face and give a report. Then the studio would ask questions we couldn't hear, and you'd see them respond.
Those were known as wild feeds.
Back in the early 90's I was given a 10 foot dish. I reassembled it on top of grandma & grandpa's house and used a sewer pipe vent to support it. Also had to use guy wires for stabilization. The main goal was to receive the NASA feed, being on the west coast I had to aim the dish at lowest possible point in the sky. I did not have a screw jack so this was all done by hand. But it was well worth it. I would watch the live feed for hours every day, soaking it all in.
Just wanna say this: that T-shirt *perfectly* fits him and his channel!
I remember having both a Sky dish and BSB squarial on the side of my house back in early 90s. The Sky dish was erected whilst it was snowing and the installer said the picture would improve when the snow stopped 😂
My father used to install the modern 18-inch dishes in a snow-heavy area, and we definitely found that snow had an effect. Not on the signal itself coming in... but from accumulating snow changing the curvature of the dish, throwing it off the focus point. He always advised customers to install them within arm's reach of the ground or a window if possible, and keep a snow brush handy. Sounds crazy, but brush-brush-brush and the picture comes back.
My grandparents actually got scammed by investing in a company trying to sell satellite signal scrambler technology to broadcasters in the 1980s haha. They also had a huge motorized C-band dish all the way into the mid/late 90s. I used to go and change satellites on the TV receiver and watch the dish change azimuth and elevation to point to a different bird in GEO.
No wonder I ended up working in space comms when I got old!
I have really enjoyed seeing a series of videos from Scott covering my job
I like these series videos!!! Keep beaming them up Scotty!! 👍👍
Wow! As someone born in the early 60s, your series has made me marvel at just how much things have advanced in my lifetime!
In the 80's I had one of those HUGE satellite dishes in my back yard. Now, 40 years later, it is truly hard to believe.
I remember in my early teens my parents getting a SKY decoder. After they went to bed I used to tune into RTL, because I'd heard it showed porn. After waiting an age for the signal to de-scramble all I got was Marty Feldman dubbed into German. Occasionally I'd see a bit of hairy muff 70's soft core and that was enough for me. You never got that on the BBC.
Science and technology is amazing.
Life always finds a way lol
Marvelous History of antennas in space. Scott giving hams what they want.
That's funny about Star trek... I remember ding the same thing, taping DS9 from paramount's direct-to-station downlink (no encryption back then). And watching the interview setups on news shows, the local Los Angeles NBC station was uplinked before the Tonight Show came on (hello Susan, you were probably switching at MC what I was watching on the dish in Chico...) good times, good times... :)
When I was a teenager, my next door neighbor was an electrical engineer who played with ham radio. He had built his own dish that he called a “chicken wire” dish. When channels started being scrambled, he figured out that the code was only 8 bits. He used an 8 bit dip switch and cycled through all 256 possible combinations until he found the correct combination. He eventually built an automated circuit to do it for him. I moved away, but several years later I met him on the street. He told me the channels had moved from simple scrambling to actual encryption. I didn’t understand the difference at the time, but I learned. Hanging out in his garage and watching him work led to my career in programming PLC/HMI’s for automated manufacturing.
Satellite TV accounts were not available in Canada because those networks did not have Canadian licenses, and the Canadian government refused to allow their sale.
Since they were not available, the Canadian government would not go after pirates nor would extradite them, so there actually was a market for private bounty hunters that would go kidnap pirates and bring them to the US...
When i was a teenager in Wyoming, we paid for cable TV in town, but some of my classmates lived out on ranches where there was no service. Some said having television was like listening to radio with snow on the screen.
If there was oil or coal mining on your land, you could afford an $8,000 to $12,000 satellite dish receiver system and watch movies out on the ranch. At that time, a dish was about 4 meters and fixed in place on one satellite.
Thanks Scott for this series on communication satellites.
Ha, I also remember watching STTNG days before anyone else could! Babylon 5 was distributed on a non-scrambled satellite channel too. My house was in a valley with no line-of-sight to the TV broadcast towers, so in the late 80s it was satellite TV or VHS tapes.
11:50 It just struck me how crazy the physics is of that: 2.5deg beam width, and it covers a good portion of the earth, and that "little" satellite sends out enough RF energy "photons" so that you just need a small dish to collect and focus them into a usable and pretty high bandwidth signal.
Yeah, the size of modern dishes is incredible. The signal must be so miniscule when received. Microwatts of power?
Every once in a while when you drive around a rural area you can spot one of the old ground mount 3 or 4 meter satellite dishes still left in someone's yard... If those were for satellite TV back in the day, it's amazing how far technology has advanced.... And how awesome that must have felt at the time to use a dish to get signal.
@@volvo09 About 1 million times less than microwatts, assuming 1kW transmitter over the area of earth and receiving antenna 1 m2 then signal power is 2 picowatts
@@kiiverkk wow, that is such a tiny number! It's amazing it can even be picked up...
Makes me wonder how weak the signal from voyager 2 is now. That is hard to get with massive satellite arrays...
GPS is even more amazing. Not that high of a bandwidth, but your phone has a small antenna going in every direction in a car and still has reception. That's femtowatts, and your phone basically receives only noise. Hardware wise and Software wise a tour de force just for the way to the bakery and back.
Back in the early 80s I worked for a small technology company in Toronto that designed satellite receivers for Scientific Atlanta and Philips among others. We had an antenna in the front of our office in downtown Toronto and a small herd of them on the roof of the renovated home we worked in on Prince Arthur Avenue. some of the unedited cable feeds we used to get on our test bench were pretty wild…
I remember as a kid sitting in front of our tiny CRT TV, black and white noise during bad weather, and then TV signal again, briefly displaying the text ASTRA.
And today I haven't watched TV for over a decade because the annoying ads ruined it.
Really intriguing video Scott! so amazing to see the incremental steps that technology & human innovation has made to bring us to where we are today!
I spent about $400 on equipment to do weather satalite image decoding and satalite monitoring recently and this series is perfect to scratch my itch!
As a nerd tech at Motorola, a few of us were really into the satellite craze in the early 70's and 80's, and one of the "perks" on those 10' dishes was being able to receive and watch West Coast shows, like Johnny Carson, live, as they shot the show earlier and sent it to NYC for re-broadcast at 11PM. It usually included bloopers that would be later edited out. The cost back then for a 10' dish and the needed expensive cabling needed was about $2000. Loved those days!
Scott, thanks for the latest update on the history of Saillite communications.
Probably one of my favourite series you've done so far. Not just because you mentioned where I work in one episode (Goonhilly)
Scott, a fascinating story you may want to look into is the amateur radio satellites. Hams have been designing, building, and using satellites since 1961, when OSCAR 1 was launched. Several of the spacecraft were built but only one was launched. One of the spares resides at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Project OSCAR got its start in 1959 when Donald Stoner (W6TNS) famously asked if anyone had a spare rocket. Two years later, history was made.
Grin, thx for the memories. Im 84 and back then this was the leading breaking stuff that was bigger than most people realized. I became a teckie at this point and never looked back but only forward. To this day i am hooked on the latest and most unique technologies available. I can wait for what we will get woth StarShip. The day the stock goes public you know ill have been standing in a long line days before.......
Really enjoyed this one. 👍👀
Yeah I remember reading about the ATS-6 transmissions to India and that they were being received by hobbyists, back when that occurred.
Also I had a receiver for the Astra satellites, but not particularly early (I think it must have been in 1994, by then there already were 4 Astra satellites, 64 analog programmes).
There was a lot to receive for the hobbyist back then, that has decreased a lot. Much of the use of satellites for TV programme distribution has been replaced by fiber and the internet.
My first satellite dish was from an electronics flea market where someone selling generic Ku band dishes for satellite TV reception and a LNR with it. Another was selling generic STV tuners. There are websites that list free satellite TV stations, though mostly foreign and religious channels (and many looked like HSN and QVC). While the content was boring but I actually did my first reception from spacecraft in the Clarke Belt. Though the day I first got my system going was the day Arthur C. Clarke died.
I loved satellite tv in the 1990's, analogue s band, c band, and extended ku band, a stack of decoders for Filmnet and tv1000 and others, had a 2 meter dish with a motorised az el mount with inclinded orbit capability and a clear view from 70 east to 70 west here in the south of the UK. it all got boring when digital tv started
As always, Scott gifts his extensive talents in this great review of telecommunications ia satellite! Thank you "Scut"!
I'm really enjoying this series, keep up the great work!
I believe the very first private satellite commlink station was Arthur C. Clarke's system, installed by his publisher so he could work without leaving his home in Sri Lanka. Poetic, in a way. It was used almost exclusively for email and straight text based manuscript files.
I can remember installing satelite dishes 1978 through 1984 for friends who could afford it..and it was a blast picking up programs like HBO...and sports events.but sadly the free stuff went away very quickly and you had to subscribe for channels...
Great memories..
Thanks for a great video...
❤
When we had a large C band satellite dish I enjoyed tuning it to the obscure satellites and watching programming from other countries. Our system had the ability to be manually tuned, so it was nice to find a satellite that wasn’t listed or commonly programmed. Also I remember seeing the captain midnight HBO message when it happened.
8:48 That restoration went VERY wrong at this moment. I'll be seeing those faces in my nightmares.
Loved my 12' dish in the 1980s. I first got NASA Select TV through it (and "free" HBO, Showtime, etc., plus raw feeds of the political TV talk shows of the times). It was a very good time in communications history. And we could buy just the channels we actually wanted to watch back then. Imagine that. Crazy thing was twice a year waiting for the sun to get out of the way behind a satellite so you could receive it. Loved NASA Select before the PR guys and gals took over and it was more "raw" than today. I know, I know, they have to make it for the masses, but back then for space nerds it was great.
I was only a kid for the tail end of big dishes in the 90s, but ohhh do I miss the idea of just getting the channel you actually wanted instead of a "package" of unrelated junk. I also miss how TLC, A&E, History, Discovery, all used to have _educational_ shows instead of mind-rotting garbage.
@@johnladuke6475sadly, it seems all those channels that were great have been in a race to the bottom to capture ratings. TV has indeed returned to being a "great wasteland" with most content written on a 6th grade level, if even that. Or its all-derivative drivel. I rarely watch anything fictional at all anymore.
@@rosswarren436Same. I’ll watch the tube when my wife wants to watch something, but normally I just watch docs, YT videos like Scotts, or read. Today’s fictional is just terrible.
That “go-go dancers for scale” photo at 2:01 is hilarious.
Love the series. Are you going to cover the future, Starlink, etc.?
If I remember correctly in the 1980s you could buy pirated descrambler key cards for receivers to access scrambled stations since legal access wasn't generally available in Canada. But they would only last till the keys were changed and people would have to find the next ones. Eventually legal alternatives were more widely available so people gave up on the hassles. Plus the dishes got a lot smaller which was more practical.
Reminds me of the pirate cards available in the uk to unscramble sky tv. The one I had let you copy someone elses card and every few months you would have to sneak a copy of an updated card when they changed the keys. Eventually sky cottoned on to this and messed around with the memory on their cards making it uncopyable on the one I had. Later ones let you reflash the card via a serial cable providing you could find the images on some dodgy ftp site. I also had another card that unscrambled mainland european channels that used nagravision encryption.
Swinging the dish to point towards the Eutelsat constellation also netted you unscrambled versions of things like mtv and a few `adult` offerings .
Browsing the many many different teletext systems from around europe was fun as well.
I think later on, the decryption keys (for digital satellite) were distributed via the internet.
Thank you
I saved up and got one in the 1990’s. Loved watching live feeds by networks, including NASA TV 📺
Fascinating history! Thanks for the lesson, Scott! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
So happy you are covering this history… I’d really like you get into the Radarsat and it’s technology
As a currently licensed HAM, I really enjoyed this episode.
I'm often blown away by factoids in your videos Scott, but fluorine-hydrogen?! I had to look into it. Wikipedia's Tripropellant Rocket page says: "In the 1960s, Rocketdyne fired an engine using a mixture of liquid lithium, gaseous hydrogen, and liquid fluorine to produce a specific impulse of 542 seconds, likely the highest measured such value for a chemical rocket motor."
Tripropellant rockets! I've been subscribed to you forever, but can't recall you touching on this topic. The wiki article goes on to talk about how tripropellant engines have been considered for SSTO's, as in those engines, the ratio of different fuels changes as it flies.
As an Alaskan, hearing about ATS-1's telemedicine trials up here is next on my list to look into. Anyway, fascinating stuff, thanks as always!
I setup a 1.3 mt in 1992 in north Italy, with horizon horizon rotor i could receive from Tokio to 🇺🇸 with a EchoStar 5500, then digital Topfield. It's still perfect today, directly connected to a TV set, after millions of motor spins
In the 90s and early 00s here in Aus, you'd get dodgy dish installations with a hacked genuine Austar box to unscramble it.
But after a while Austar would periodically change presumably the algorithm to stop such installs from working.
I assume the adoption of digital satellite transmission eventually greatly increased the TV satellite performance (or decreased their size and cost) because of digital compression algorithms like MPEG-2, which reduced the required data stream to a small fraction of the uncompressed one. Of course, it would take a while till such video codecs were invented.
Great series!
I like your new book there Scott, I've got it sitting next to me on my desk too.
My grandparents had one of those big dishes in rural Oregon in the 90s. I remember watching MacGyver and the OJ chase on it.
Awesome Information !!
(Love the T-Shirt)
...will we ever have enough "TDRS" Satellites ?
And a far larger and more sensitive deep space network for all the missions we have planned?
Your mention of the TWT amplifier tube reminded me of something I've always wondered about. Have any vacuum tubes (TWT or otherwise) ever flown into orbit without that pesky envelope to maintain the vacuum? Seems like a chance for mass savings and possible new degrees of freedom when designing these components. Sure, makes checkout on the ground harder..
Traveling Wave Tubes went away as Solid State started getting into the Ghz world, cheaply enough, and a lot more compact than the plumbing style layout of waveguides. I miss them. 😁
Vacuum Tubes are slightly mis-named, as even though they can be long and cylindrical looking, they are Vacuum Bulbs. The cylindrical part is there to focus the electrons from the heater (or light) to the various grids in a row, on to a plate, and take up minimal footprint, but the bulb could be done in any shape as long as the heater/grid(s)/plate spacial relationship is maintained. As far as whether they could be used 'naked' in space, IIRC, the 'vacuum of space' is a relative term the closer you get to the planets what with traces of atmosphere and major amounts of dust floating around, a vacuum tube has a much better environment with controlled Vacuum and as an enclosed container, no dust collecting to energized circuits.
@@paulholmes672 I was thinking of the vacuum tubes I played around with at the amateur radio club in college. We had built a VHF amplifier with a 4CX250 tube, which was mostly a metallic and ceramic shell with fins and forced air cooling. And I recall, used some Beryllium material as part of the "envelope" because it had a compatible thermal coefficient of expansion.. but don't inhale any dust!
There was another amplifier with some 4-400A tubes, a real glass envelope and all. And quite the warm glow from the filament!
I suppose I was thinking of either of those two devices and potential simplifications of the mechanical aspects. I didn't know that TWT devices were not under vacuum..
As a kid in the 1990's, I remember all those ads for satellite dishes and descramblers at the back of magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics.
I was in Resolute Bay, Northwest Territories (75°N) the summer that the huge dish was installed to receive broadcasts from Annik. It was a really big deal.
I am sad Bob Cooper's name did not come up in this video. I would throw out a couple of things. First, while the US was late to the DTH market; they were the first to go with digital compressions allowing a lot more channels per transponder. Also, I believe that that North America had a different allocations, with half of KU banding being lower power with 2 degree spacing and then higher power DBS with 9 degree spacing. Also, technically PrimeStar was the first Direct to Home offering before DirecTV and Dish on rented satellite capacity. I have been meaning to go down the rabbit hole a c-band satellite hacking from the 1980's.
It seems Mr. Cooper passed away in May of this year. Sad to lose pioneers...
Viva Captain Midnight...
a hero in the shadows
Well, looking at the empty space between subatomic particles, the glass is almost 100% empty! 😂
The first house I bought in 1995 could not have cable, and being out in the boondocks the only best choice was a C-band satellite dish. We enjoyed that until we moved in 2003.
great episode , i had 3 meter dish back in the day, was awesome
I remember my dad picking up the Dish Network 18" dish and recever package from Costco in 97 or 98? We mounted it to the house and he adjusted the dish slightly until the signal from EchoStar 1 was in the green zone. It was pretty awesome coming from an antenna that only got the local NY and CT news channels.
Never guessed I would see Sue Lawley on a Scott Manley video 😅😅😅
At 15:44, I recall an episode of “The Big Bang Theory” where the guys went into the California desert to camp and Howard used something similar to “tap into the East Coast feed” of some provider.
Great and really interesting video as always! Keep up the great work!
The house we lived in in the '90s had a 12' diameter motorized dish in the backyard. We didn't have a descrambler, but I figured out how to watch several channels. Mostly just watching broadcast NBC or whatever at different times than they were aired locally. The controller didn't save any azimuth or bearing information, though, so we had to do it by trial and error. It was fun aiming the dish around, though.
There's a delicious irony in using a giant satellite dish to pirate Star Trek in order to view it before it got broadcast.
*Great video, Scott...👍*
A house I lived in 20 years ago, had a huge old freestanding satellite dish in the backyard. I didn't really understand why it was so large when most satellite dishes were like a quarter the diameter and were mounted on the sides of people's homes including the one the house actually used at that time. It was likely one of those old homemade satellite dishes though.
Not necessarily homemade. When I visited my brother in Canada in the late 1980s in his (then) new house, lots of his neighbours in this new development had large, ground mounted steerable dishes in their back gardens, often with neat little white fences round them to keep children, pets and wildlife out. I remember walking down the road one evening and hearing several of the dishes start to move (motors whirring) as some popular TV show on a different satellite had several of households retuning.
My brother and his family weren't big TV viewers so didn't have one, nor at the time cable TV. I did rig up a rather large homemade Yagi in the back garden so that I could watch Benny Hill deep fringed from over the border in the USA, but that was terrestrial transmissions. ;-)
The reason they were so big is because the power output on satellites wasn't as high as they are now. Otherwise it would have shortened the lifespan of the satellite substantially.
In 1986, I had a 2.5m dish to receive transponders from Eutelsat F1, including channels like Sky Channel, Music Box, and so on. Cable TV wasn't available yet where I lived in the countryside. I was the only one in the village with satellite TV.
For future thumbnail creation, consider avoiding long, red, horizontal line elements (such as the red arrow in this video's thumbnail). I saw this video's thumbnail 4 times before I clicked on it in my feed; each time I didn't watch it was because I mistakenly thought that RUclips was showing that I'd already watched most of it (since their play-timeline indicator is a also horizontal, red bar).
Yep.
I remember in the days of the large dishes that there was a guide book that listed what shows were going to be on what satellite and channel, much like TV Guide for OTA & cable. It was thick, compared to TV Guide, because of all the additional channels that could be picked up compared to OTA & cable.
The old "Big Ugly Dishes" (BUDs) are still very much in demand for amateur-radio satellite enthusiasts, and EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) enthusiasts. Myself, I'm involved in a project to restore a former-NATO satellite ground terminal (built in 1971) for use in radio astronomy and amateur EME efforts. I'd previously been involved in a project to restore an 18m dish that was used in early Canadian satellite projects--Alouette and Isis satellites--although those were science satellites, rather than comms satellites.
Was it you who sold the geodesic dome to "saveitforparts"? He bought one from Canada from the Diefenbunker, outside Ottawa, who are restoring an old NATO satellite ground station for radio astronomy. If you don't know of Gabe and the saveitforparts channel, look him up, he has some videos on the facility.
As an aside, there's someone here in the comments who sold those 3m+ dishes for scrap! Argh!
Oh what memories of old C ban, I did installs in the early 80s-90s and had a 10 ft dish my self.
Childhood memories ❤ I am in satellite TV field since 1997 when analog satellite transmission was at its peak in Asia❤
I have loved this series
I had a C band dish in 1981. It was a home made affair consisting of a 10 foot spun aluminum dish from an old microwave site. My first receiver was a cheap pll receiver. later on. I got a better receiver and eventually had to subscribe using a videocipher descrambler. I also installed C band at the hospitals I worked for as many medical seminars were belng delivered using the descrambler used by Canadian TV providers and some porn companies.
I recognize the new book on the desk behind you. I hear it’s a good read.
In the early 1980s I lived and worked on Bougainville Island where the town was built and serviced by the giant copper and gold mine. The community built an Intelsat receiving station including a big dish and a cable TV distribution system for the whole town of 7,000 houses. That meant many weekends of work for us all, most not knowing the detailed technical side. But it worked and brought the world to our very remote community.
Hey Scott, a video idea: could you give us an update on what the Chinese space station has been up to?
I had a 10 foot dish with an STS positioner and receiver that worked really well. I loved watching CBC shows and even some from Mexico. During the first Gulf war, I could get he live feeds from the gulf as they were relayed back to the states. HBO and Showtime scrambled their channel;s and eventually virtually all channels were encrypted and not available. I always enjoyed surfing around to all the satellites to see what was being broadcast, but alas, no more.
I remember a neighbor up the street had one of those giant dishes AND was a HAM operator. The home had a giant dish on the roof and in the back yard, there were 2-3 antenna off to the side, and their car looked out of MASH but covered in 3-4 different radio antenna + a small dish. Meanwhile, the rest of the neighborhood had cable.
Either Scott wrote the script for this video a long time ago and had forgotten about the "fluorine/hydrogen upper stage" or he should look at getting into acting. Because I felt that in my soul.
Interesting, I thought the US would have had commercial sat service way before that. I guess the cable company's have had a choke hold for a while. makes sense that places like Canada and Australia rolled it out to service the huge swaths of land without cables. I remember our primary school getting a dish installed in the early/mid 90's for various educational shows, but there were a few kids that had satellite at home. that many TV stations was inconceivable at the time. there were 2 free to air channels, I think sat had 12?
If memory serves, I think most of the C-Band satellites back then had 24 channels. 12 were vertically polarized and 12 were horizontally polarized. We would push a button to make a small piece of metal in the feed horn rotate to whichever set of channels we wanted to watch.
The US cable TV industry started early, with "community antenna" systems in the late 1940s and 1950s. Basically, many rural areas couldn't get over-the-air TV, even with a big roof antenna -- either due to sheer distance, or to hills/mountains/valley walls in the way. So near towns in such areas, someone would build a really _big_ antenna and wire homes and businesses up to it for a monthly fee.* Sometimes these antennas could pick up stations from multiple nearby cities, and many systems added their own primitive news and weather channels** -- along with public- and community-access channels -- to otherwise-empty channels on their service.
In the 1970s, dedicated cable channels like HBO started appearing on these systems, and larger cable companies started forming through mergers and acquisitions of local systems. By the 1980s, there were enough cable channels for cable TV to roll out in the major cities too.
* My dad's aunt subscribed to one of these when Dad was growing up. Her town was in a deep river valley, which blocked signals from _two_ sorta-nearby larger towns. So it was pretty much the only way to get TV there at the time.
** Text of headlines and/or stories from wire services. Or a feed of National Weather Service forecasts, plus a camera pointed at temperature, humidity, wind, etc dials for current conditions.
I do hope you cover the Max Headroom incident too
I remember well when those big dishes dotted the landscape; mainly in the rural areas and small towns where there was no cable service.
I was buying/building DTH satellite systems in the UK (mainly based on Pace brand products) in the 1980s and needed a 1.2M+ dish to get a decent number of satellites on a motorised system. Now you can get away with an 80cm dish for the same signal quality. That's 1.13m^2 reduced to 0.5m^2..... over 50% reduction in area. Almost all of that reduction has been made possible by the performance of LNBs, in those days a 1.3db loss LNB cost a fortune, now they are 0.3/0.4db and cost a few quid.
17:17 - The mention of "pre-air" piracy reminded me of downloading episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from IRC days before it was first broadcast
I watch many CBC on Anik E2 in Northern California by way of the Big Ugly Dish in the 90's (shoutout Royal Canadian Air Farce)
My favorite communication satellite will always be Telstar I. Launched in 1961.