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There are plenty of free satellites up there that you can point a dish at, some of these are bound to have some coverage, it may not be in english but commentry isn't exactly necessary.

New satellites are launched all the time. Is it because it's an internet-only communications satellite? Eutelsat already launched one: e-BIRD at 33 deg. E.

Terrestrial channels are: BBC One, BBC Two, ITV, Channel 4 and five.

BBC One & Two are paid for from the licence fee. ITV and five are fully commercial stations. Channel 4 pumps its profits back into production (AFAIK).

We have satellite TV (Sky) which has literally hundreds of channels. We have British equivalents of HBO (Sky Movies) and ESPN (Sky Sports).

Cable provides most satellite channels.

A full list of all satellite channels aimed at the UK audience si available at Lyngsat. In addition, you can also pick up hundreds of European channels.

It's available free in the U.S. on Dish Network (channel 9400), many cable networks or direct from Ku-band satellite on Galaxy 10R (11.805GHz, Horizontal, 4580ksym/sec).

Straight from the lab to your living room.

>This may change with the launch of Dish's next satellite.

Dish has always had the upper hand on capacity. Here's the list of DirecTV satellites (via lyngsat):

101 - DirecTV 1R/2/4S
110 - DirecTV 6
119 - DirecTV 5

I don't know where DirecTV 7S is, it isn't listed.

And DishNetwork run satellites:

61.5 - EchoStar 3
105 - AMC 2
110 - EchoStar 6/8
119 - EchoStar 7
121 - EchoStar 9
148 - EchoStar 1/2
151 - EchoStar 4

That's a *LOT* of broadcast power. And with the Turbocoding (soon to be 8PSK) used on 105/121, that's twice the bang for the buck. Not to mention the option of 7/8 FEC over straight 5/6 QPSK FEC (all that DirecTV supports), they have much more to play with. They can squeeze a bit out of the failing transponders by setting the FEC to 1/2.

VideoGuard seems to be an extremely common Satellite TV encryption system, browsing the different Sats over at LyngSat.

I wonder how effective VideoGuard is at protecting content. Anyone had any success decoding it?

Lyngsat is the place for FTA Sat information.

the free satellite channels you can pick up are pretty crappy.

For those wanting to know this is their website. And these are the channels they carry.

The Research Channel, University of California, The University of Washington channel, HealthTV, University House, Educating Everyone.

The Research Channel in particular has some great lectures, and is available for free on Galaxy 10 Ku band with a 1 meter dish.

I'd like more, though, and if Cosmos Studios gets behind it, perhaps they will retransmit the Cosmos series for all to see.

Many of ABC's regional news feeds are carried on Telstar 4. Channel Line up

Here's a page with information on the television signals carried by Telstar 4:
http://www.lyngsat.com/t4.shtml

>The satellite transmission is limited to Dolby Pro Logic sound at best (because that can be encoded into a stereo stream), so no Dolby Digital or DTS sound for you.

Actually, the DVB transport stream can support *anything* (raw data included) so the likely reasons they aren't broadcasting DD are that either some older receivers are crap and get confused on private/unknown data streams (wouldn't surprise me) or that they are running out of space on the transponders. Well, there is one more reason: Lack of demand.

In Canada, some broadcasters are already doing HDTV via MPEG-2 on DVB satellite (such as on ExpressVU / Nimiq 2), widescreen of course, 17 mbps (basically 1 HDTV signal + 1 low-quality "regular" signal per transponder), with dolby digital sound. MPEG-4 test streams are in the works for certain higher-end private users, I hear...

Hmmm... 2003-03-24 04:29:41 Finding war backhaul feeds on the Big Dish? (askslashdot,media) (rejected)

I have an analog BUD that can hit both horizons. The problem I've found, is that not a lot of signals are being broadcast Clear To Air anymore. Except for breaking news or sporting events being broadcast to a host of affiliates, almost everything is getting encrypted.

And unfortunately, a lot of the CTA signals that are still around are moving to digital. Unfortunately I can't justify the cost of upgrading our Chaparral analog C/KU receivers to digital, because we don't use our analog receiver that much to begin with.

Plus, wild feed websites are disappearing and/or not being updated. I'll end up finding a killer website with a full list of CTA radio and video signals, only to glance at the date and see it hasn't been updated since 1999.

Aside from usenet postings and Lyngsat (which is getting hit-or-miss), accurate information is sparse at best. Anyone have a good sat information repository that is updated frequently?

Usenet newsgroups: alt.video.satellite.mpeg-dvb, rec.video.satellite.tvro

Google keywords: satellite wild feeds

Note that these sources are useful no matter where in the world you are; they're not U.S. specific.

Have fun.

A word of warning to any Slashdotters who are thinking this might be a nice way to get around paying for a DirecTiVo (or DirecTV DVR as I think they're calling the Series 2 ones) or DishPVR:

I've looked into building my own satellite PVR, and from what I learned, I think I can safely say that this box in all likelihood will not work with DirecTV or Dish Network. DirecTV uses its own proprietary encryption scheme which isn't supported by anything but DTV-licensed receivers, and while Dish Network uses Nagravision encryption, which is supported by some things (like Hauppauge's WinTV DBS card), they marry their smartcards to their receivers, so a Dish Network smartcard will only work in the receiver in which it was first activated unless you hack it (and even then it may not work outside a Dish Network receiver). Basically, this thing is useless unless you want to use it to record free-to-air satellite broadcasts.

here you can find what they broadcast.On XM Roll and on XM Rock

here you can find what they broadcast.On XM Roll and on XM Rock

Paramount has been playing all sorts of tricks with the UPN Voyager and Enterprise feeds at least since Mid to Late 1999, It's old news to me.

The interesting thing here is that the Enterprise Feeds sent to Canada, on Telstar 5 TP 16 for broadcast say on A-Channel don't have this

What we know is that this is lucurative, and people who can't compare the two will not know what it is that they are missing.

I suppose that these people will have to get a new name.

Actually, Dish isn't the only DVB broadcaster in the states. There are a lot of single channel broadcasters on Telstar 5 Ku-band. Look at lyngsat for info. Most of these are non-US stations transmitting TV for expats.

I think we are going to need a few more satellites.

Have a look over here:

Lyngsat

Looks pretty crowded up there already ;)

With a C-Band BUD, you can get many SCPC channels (analog tho) for free. root around at Lyngsat for info.

One of the best things I have found is WRN1. 24/7 live feeds from around the world. sat or net-streaming

- another cosmic ray -