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Ask Slashdot: Experiences With Free To Air Satellite TV?

Posted by timothy on from the old-hobbies-are-best-hobbies dept.

Dishwasha (125561) writes "Just a few days ago I incidentally discovered a little known secret called free-to-air. Amazingly enough even in the depths of Slashdot, there appear to have been no postings or discussions about it. Just like over-the-air programming, there is free programming available via various satellite systems that only requires a one-time cost of getting a dish and receiver. Both Amazon and Ebay appear to have a plethora of hardware out there. I personally settled on the Geosatpro MicroHD system with a 90cm 26lbs light-weight dish (queue lots of comments about my describing 26 lbs as being light-weight) and I should be receiving that in just a few days. I'm curious, who else is using satellite FTA? What are your setups? Has anyone hacked on any of the DVR/PVR devices available? Besides greater access to international programming, what are your channel experiences?"

6 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. April First????? by anagama · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Where's the flood of April First stories? Do I have the date wrong? Is the lack of them the joke? Am I not getting the jokes?

    --
    What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
    1. Re:April First????? by PIBM · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In case that`s no prank; depending on where you live, the required operations to obtain the feed might be illegal. Where I live, there`s 3 months of summers where trees block a lot of the signal and rain just cut it, and 6 WINTER MONTHS (sorry had to vent about this weekend extra feet of snow) where the antenna won`t pickup anything because of the snow. So yeah, we didn`t use that much before just selling all of it back.

    2. Re:April First????? by Anrego · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Last year was terrible, with most of the stories being along the lines of "lulz, windows announces it's using windows kernel". I don't mind a clever joke, but most of it was just plain stupid.

      There was a lot of complaining about it, so I'm assuming they've decided to take it easy this year. Personally I'm grateful.

    3. Re:April First????? by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Anyone with a modern install dont even need heaters. the new eastern arc is so steep on the dish that a coat of car wax will keep it snow and ice free even when I got 6 feet of snow overnight this past winter.

      99% of the people bitching about Sat TV are clueless people that haven't touched it on 3 decades.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  2. Not so amazing by dbIII · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Amazingly enough even in the depths of Slashdot

    It was old news before this site started so that's probably why it hasn't been discussed.

  3. what are you a District Attorney? by globaljustin · · Score: 1, Insightful

    But in general less free legal ways

    why, for years here on /. every discussion about using media on a computing device...**every time** some joker has to chime in with "it's not legal"

    according to the DMCA it **is** fair use to give a file to a friend...the Federal Government doesn't define "friend" so **anyone** can be your friend, even if they are just a link from megavideo or one peer in a bittorrent

    when people say "but it's illegal" what they really are saying is "the lawmakers in this country aren't tech-savvy enough to make proper laws, so I'm going to point out that technically downloading files could be considered a violation every time the subject comes up to draw attention to myself"

    just stop...forever...

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett