Slashdot Mirror
Satellite Programming for Free?
Frank Winstead asks: "I stumbled upon some "Free to air" (FTA) satellite television references on the web, mostly selling equipment. There seems to be a lot of non-English programming available subscription-Free on the Ku band. The English programming seems to be a mix of religious shows, network feeds, and unexplained content from American over-the-air TV stations. Is it worth a one time ~$200 investment for equipment? Is the authoritative info on FTA?"
You'll be getting essentialy what wasn't worth scrambling and selling when the cable companies took over the space waves. There are still people out there with the big dishes (and I sold some of them) who only get this stuff unless they got the new little dish too. Consider it the short wave of TV; not to replace the other, but a neat thing in itself. You *might* catch program feeds before regular broadcast times.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
to have my own TV station!
At the very least it will increase your geek coefficient.
We've been doing this in another country for nearly 20 years. The thing is that as long as it does not become mainstream then it will stay unencrypted. The general go is to keep mum about it and it will stay as it is/has... pls ssshhhhh...
There is quite a bit of feeds in the old Ku band. It seems that the networks have forgotten that people can pick up Ku band too. I guess they don't care too much since the BUD (Big Ugly dishes) are not very common anymore.
There are all sorts of tv shows that you can pick up, such as:
- news feeds
- live feeds
- tv show feeds (for example, you can watch the episodes of "24" at least a couple of days before they are shown on the regular chanels)
There are plenty of websites that give frequencies, polarizations and longitude for the various satellites out there. I won't provide any, but they are a mere google search away.
As for equipment, $200 sounds about right for a good setup. Check eBay, you can find good deals there too.
There was a session at last year's (2003) defcon about FTA satellite tv.
Hope this info helps
Here's a free-to-air satellite TV listing for North America: http://www.milliron.net/free2air/Default.htm
Lyngsat is the place for FTA Sat information.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
I've got a good reason: piss off the HOA. Like most neighborhoods, my HoA has provisions against satellite dishes. I don't think they enforce them on the little DTV dishes like my neighbors have, but I'd love to get one of those 'search for aliens' dishes in my front yard, just to let them pay my court fees for fighting it.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/satellite.html
A few restrictions for historic buildings, safety concerns, etc.
There's some cool shit on those bands, it'd be fun just to see what kind of stuff is out there. Watching network feeds in advance is fun. Plus you'd have that cool dish, just to piss off the neibors.
Well art is art isn't it, but then again water is water; and east is east; and west is west; and if you take cranberries
satcodx.com has lots of listings for all known satellites. Select your region and look.
Do the dishes still need to be the size of a car? Can you decrypt the signals? Just wondering.
When punk rock is outlawed, only outlaws will have punk rock.
Second, there's the "loser has to pay costs" thing. Slashdotters keep bringing this up like it's some kind of holy writ. The reality is that it's not even applicable most of the time, and even when it is, it's damned hard to prove that you deserve that kind of compensation.
And here's the biggest issue of all: right or wrong, win or lose, you gotta live with these people. Do you really want to teach them to hate you so badly, they'll be looking for every little chance to get even? You might be able to force them to let you have a sat dish, but then they'll be watching you like the proverbial hawk. Every little violation will earn you the worst punishment they can manage.
Which can extend to seizing your home and turning you out on the street. Which is not as unlikely as it sounds. There was a case recently where this happened because a couple forgot to pay a $200 dollar fee.
First, my credentials: I worked in satellite transmission about 19 years ago and had a pretty good handle on what was what back then. I currently work for a national television network out of NYC. I know what has changed and what will be happening in the next few years.
On all satellites in Clarke orbits (Geostationary, first proposed by Arthur C. Clarke yes that one) the transponders are simple "Repeat what you just received" gizmoes. On the older ones, they'll continue to send back FTA stuff as they receive it but there is a movement afoot to cheapen the use of satellites by digitizing signals and using the bandwidth better by compression. This started happening first with C band satellites because C band is so expensive. C band also is less prone to rain fade and atmospheric problems.
Presently, the K band is on the chopping block (as in let's chop this one transponder by digitally-encoding several signals into the space of one) and you will notice, as time goes by, that a lot more transponders will "become encoded." This is not all about preventing you, dear reader, from getting the signals. It is being done for cost reasons alone.
At the network level, it is believed that the viewer cannot see the difference between the compressed and uncompressed signals and the non-compressed signals. While this may become a factor with the adoption of HDTV by the consumer, the network executives just don't care that much about quality these days. The assumption is that the viewer will tune in regardless.
So look for a steady decrease in the number of signals your big dish can pick up as time goes on.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
My neighbor is from Iran, I live in the United States.
He brought his wife here about 3 years ago, and he thought it would be a cool gift for her.
He can watch soccer games, news, and she can watch soap operas and many of the Arabic 'MTV' channels. It looks like any other Dish/DirectTV setup.
He bought it for $250 with some accessories at the Arab market in Dearborn. We set it up outside, ran a new cable to his TV, turned on the reciever...
I don't understand why a dish would receive less signals if as you say the networks will compress digital signals into the same space as an old analog signal. Can't you just buy new decompression boxes to hook up to your satellite? Or are you saying that these would be encrypted as well as compressed?
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
Interesting this topic would come up. I just stumbled across an ad for an FTA porn channel. It's only in Europe and Asia, but since I live in the latter, I thought it looked intriguing. Apparently it uses the small dishes being in the KU band and you can buy a card to use with a DishNetwork set top box or they say you can encode your own blank card. Maybe next time I'm in the States I'll grab a DishNetwork systeom off E-bay and bring it back here to see how it goes.
Interesting that this is in Europe and Asia, but not the US. Mmm hmm.
I suppose one could say that compression is a type of encryption if you do not know how the signal was compressed. For example, Sony's Digi-Betacam uses DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) to compress the signal as it goes down on tape. But they also make a machine that uses MPEG, another that uses M-JPEG and I think there is another format in there as well.
You'd wind up having to try out one decoder after another to figure out how the signal was compressed. That hardly winds up being cheap just to view FTA satellite signals.
Are there standards? Yes, but each situation calls for a different one. If what you have is a man sitting in a studio talking, MPEG is a great compression format. It's really crummy for sports though. Within our plant, we're completely uncompressed on our routers, completely compressed on our network. I think we have settled (as a network) on the DV25 codec, which is about the quality of mini-DV. If we sent that as a stream over satellite, then switch to MPEG for a talking head, then switch to something else for Graphics and another thing for sports, you'd be constantly chasing your tail trying to apply decompression methods.
I can tell you from our standpoint we're going to use compression tools that give us the most bang for our buck.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.