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Flat Panel Antenna for C-band TVRO?

Posted by Cliff on from the ditching-the-dish dept.

Anonymous Coward asks: "Does Slashdot know of any anyone who makes a flat panel antenna for C-band Satellite TV? The only makers of commercial flat panel antennas that I'm aware of is this one, but it's only KU-band."

4 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. Build your own by unitron · · Score: 4, Interesting

    About 20 years ago Radio-Electronics magazine had an article on building your own out of plywood. Really. It used concentric rectangles that worked as a sort of lens at those frequencies. Like microwave waveguides that somehow use empty spaces as antenna elements, the physics involved was way over my head.

    --

    I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.

  2. ok by Monkelectric · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This sounds really cool but WTF does any of it mean? :) Please drop some knowledge on me

    --

    Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley

    1. Re:ok by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Nick is deadfly, forgot my password.

      C Band is now mostly digital also. A couple of different formats which are really just variations of the same thing. DVB MPEG2 which comforms to the MPEG standard, and digicypher which is a variation on MPEG2 by Motorola.

      There continue to be some analog feeds also which are either unscrambled or available by subscription with videocipher II. Most of the digicipher channels can be subscribed to, some of the DVB channels can also be subscribed to. You need a different receiver for DVB than for digicipher. Many DVB channels are not encrypted and free to view, some digicipher channels are not encrypted. The nice thing about C Band subscriptions has always been the packaging. If you only want HBO, that is all you have to buy.

      C Band continues to be the state of the art as far as signal quality is concerned. Small dish systems generally compress their streams 2 to 3 times more than C Band feeds. This results in a picture that looks blurry. This also means less channels per satellite for C Band and the need to be able to rotate the dish. This kind of makes me wonder why anyone would want to build a flat C Band dish.

  3. Re:One site by Isao · · Score: 2, Interesting

    FYI, that's not a C-Band antenna, that is a C-Band feedhorn (the part that goes at the focal point of a parabolic or spherical dish).