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Ask Slashdot: Experiences With Free To Air Satellite TV?
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?"
C and KU band is a big investment, and I think most places encrypt these transmissions now, so you might want to check around a little more to make absolutely sure you're going to get anything worthwhile.
My Nana and Grandad goes on Holiday a lot in their Caravan, they used to use Sky Satellite in the Caravan which they found to be very expensive. However, my Grandad then switched over to using a simple freesat system which suits their needs. It recieves BBC, ITV etc which is what they want! I did see on ebay a Satellite Box running Linux (I think it was called Dream Box) and I heard you could load decryption keys onto it for the Sky Channels. However, that is illegal!
Google wants to be your friend!
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
Then there's no allot you can watch, everything is encrypted. Dish Network was popular with these systems, you could run software on the FTA receiver and pirate the signal. That's gone, so unless you live in a country with UN-encrypted programming it's a waste of money. You can use these systems, but the dish would need to be motorized. It's just not worth the money, there is no free TV in the USA anymore (Beyond an antenna).
I recognize them as the channels I skip over on cable.
Try Satellite Guys. There are a bunch of ppl there who are way into satellite tv stuff and who are eager to help.
Over here there is an absolute plethora of FTA satellite channels.
Many, if not most, are junk. Porn previews and selling crappy stuff.
But there are still many dozens quality channels like the BBC and the various German stations.BR> Just about every country has one or more FTA channels and as most people (outside of France and the UK) speak or at least understand several languages there is for people like me sufficient on offer.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Free to air statellite has been big in Europe since the 1980s, and digital (DVD-S) since the 1990s.
Hacked Linux-based receivers have pretty much dominated the European DVB-S market for the last decade, and especialy in FTA.
It's a shame that it has had little attention from Slashdot and other mainstream open source media over the years, because that has left the field free for some pretty unsavoury people in the TV encryption cracking market.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that cracked satellite receivers were up there with cracked routers as a major source of Linux malware.
They way I see it, the issue with FTA is the fact that you have to put up with a motorized dish and endure the wait for this dish to move around and lock onto whichever satellite you are looking for, or you need to fill your yard with several dishes and it gets more complex and expensive (Head End in the Yard). If you live in many places, you can't fill your yard with those larger dishes.
Besides, there is pretty good HD quality 8VSB content available OTA from local TV stations thanks to the digital TV conversion.
If you want to nerd on something, it's far cheaper to get a nice Winegard HD8200U antenna and a HDHomeRun tuner, unless you live out in the middle of nowhere.
You can also experiment with amplifying the signal off the antenna. The problem is you raise the noise floor along with the signal (lowering the effective SNR), so it is sometimes required to pad down the input a little depending on where you put the amplifier.
I grew up with this as my only source of TV in the 80s and 90s (we were too far from town and lived in the mountains to use local over the air tv). We had an 8' dish though and it must have weighed well in excess of 26lbs so yes your dish is quite light. We never seemed to have issues finding channels with something to watch and were able to pickup news, cartoons (very important), shows, and movies. The main issue was that the channels had to be scanned manually then. There were two sets of numbers, the first number if I remember correctly would physically rotate the dish outside then the second number would scan the channel options available available at that dish angle. This took a lot of time and ended up with us writing down the common locations for shows that we wanted to watch. Today I would hope there is an auto-scan feature that would allow you to just scan the channels to see what you're able to receive and store those. Unfortunately I haven't used this system in more than 10 years so I'm not very knowledgeable on what the system is like to use today. Hopefully something in my post was useful to you or someone else reading through.
Saying "all faiths are equivalent" is akin to saying "all drugs are the same".
I'm always intrigued by free over-the-air broadcasting. If I didn't live in a valley 50 miles from the closest broadcaster I would definitely have a TV antenna. No cable for me! That said, I looked at the list of US FTA broadcasters and they don't look that great to me. Maybe I'd check out eh Pentagon Channel a couple times.
Interestingly (perhaps) the UK has a lot of free-to-air content, and satellite in particular is popular because lots of people have mini-dishes on their houses from their own or a previous Sky TV installation. Freesat doesn't get as much coverage as Freeview but you can still walk into your local electronics retailer and find a big-brand satellite PVR next to the other TV hardware.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The satellite providers should provide some free basic tv with no monthly fees and just charge the full cost of equipment or allow people to use their own equipment and then make the additional revenue on the advertising side. Other paid cable channels could be an up sell with monthly subscriptions or pay per view. If the satellite providers presented a sufficiently attractive mix of advertising supported channels for cord cutters, then it would be a no brainer for people just to add satellite to their household mix of entertainment options for a couple hundred bucks worth of equipment. The number of viewers would go up by many millions. It really would be an opportunity for a win for the public and a big win for the satellite companies.
A better selection of free over the air advertising supported broadcasts are something that is really missing from the current market.
Maybe it's fun to play with, nothing wrong with that, but ultimately it's not a good way to watch TV. If you just want basic TV, an antenna will get you a good amount of channels. My $5 Radio Shack antenna gets me like 50 channels including weird shit like the Dog channel. If you want to watch extended channels like HBO, go to Piratebay or Playon or Torrentstream or Hulu.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
As someone who puts those shows up in the air, I'll tell you it all depends on what you're looking for.
If you're looking for sports backhauls, you'll most likely be disappointed. Almost every professional sports venue in the country uses fiber as a backhaul, not satellite. The only places that use birds are places that do small numbers of broadcasts infrequently (think college campuses). And even then, a lot of networks have policies that require them to use BISS encryption. So unless you're friends with someone in the uplink world (because yes, they do share downlink info and BISS codes with each other so they can watch live events while on the road) you'll find the content to be sparse.
If you're looking for TV networks, look at it this way. If there's any value to the network (i.e. if it's on anything but the base tier of your cable or satellite operator), it's encrypted. Because why would they give away for free what they're getting $1.60/subscriber to sell? You'll find some foreign networks and stuff you most likely don't care about, but that's about it. If you know the timing you might find syndicated shows being fed to your local TV stations (think Ellen or Judge Judy) or something mildly useful like that, but even more of those shows are now being BISS encrypted. The only reason more syndicated shows don't encrypt is because they get sick of having to pay to re-feed shows because of inept downlink ops.
The holy grail for FTA is finding "wild feeds" - temporary uplinks from site to a network (think breaking news). You can find some serious hilarity here sometimes. But the feeds come and go in a matter of quarter hours, so they're tougher to find.
The feeds are out there, but there's not a lot of FTA ones in North America. Further complicating things is the myriad of encoding specs (bitrate, constellation, FEC, encoder model, etc etc etc). It ends up being a total crapshoot trying to find things. So I guess what I'm saying is it depends on what you're looking for. If you're doing this as a hobby to see what you can find, it can be a lot of fun and even rewarding at times. If you're looking to replace cable, you're going to wish you'd spent your money on a Roku or a Slingbox at your friend's house instead.
I got into IKS for a bit, but Netflix and Hulu aren't that much more expensive. Plus they aren't illegal and they don't get cut off in heavy snow or rain.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
It was old news before this site started so that's probably why it hasn't been discussed.
You'll need a dish (typically 90cm), somewhere with a view of your selected satellites to plant it, an LNB to go on the dish (Low Noise Block Amplifier, the actual "antenna"; the dish is just a reflector), a bunch of RG6 cable leading to your TV, and a receiver.
Before buying all this, take a look at the various satellites and channels available to you, and pick a starting satellite. You'll need to be sure that you have a clear line of sight to the "bird". A great site for this is lyngsat. In the US I suggest starting with Galaxy 19, which has several hundred channels on it.
Summarizing the rest, plant the dish, aim, and scan with your receiver to program the channels. You can get all sorts of things regularly, and occasional "wild feeds" that aren't intended for public consumption. There's also encrypted video, which is either pay TV, private company channels (like Ford, etc.) or network backhauls.
Later on you can get into multiple satellites, either with multiple LNB's on one dish, multiple dishes and a switch, or a motorized (!) dish. They're all fun.
It's a lot of fun, and can be a great intro for kids to electronics, radio reception, satellites, orbital mechanics, space, etc.
I just learned about free to air myself a few months ago when I was researching on how to improve my OTA reception. My house has a substantial multi-antenna rooftop installation that was installed in the 1980s. When we got our first TV with digital tuner, we were thrilled to find we had well over 40 channels (including 30+ digital). After the shutoff, and over the last few years we've lost most of them save for the major networks which are now intermittent (My bandwidth usage has gone up steadily as I've lost channels). In researching fixes, I've found lots of conflicting info (75 or 300ohm coax or twin lead... lighting protection or not/ where to place amp, how/not to pull cable/you should/n't need an amp, you can/can't combine multiple antenna signals, you need a rotator/rotators suck). So free-to-air got my tail wagging. But like OTA, reliable consistent info is difficult. I asked Radio Shack about free-to-air but they assumed (no matter how many times I tried to explain) that it was illegal and a big pain because "you have to chase codes down on the internet." (I know it was dumb to ask them, but sometimes you get lucky and meet an enthusiast). That said, I'm very interested in your experience, I hope you're documenting it.
Ah, welcome to the US, where we have 2 liter and half-gallon bottles next to each other on the grocery shelves. In engineering school, I had to learn about units called "slugs". I hate slugs.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Now that the bandwidth is available, there are a lot easier ways of getting free programming...
But in general less free legal ways
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Years ago I used to be infatuated with the BUD, so much so that when I visited my uncle, he'd save me the program guides and channel lists he used to get in the mail. Then along came Lyngsat, which tells you all of that. http://lyngsat.com/
But more importantly for you, they will tell you if a channel is encrypted or not on whatever satellite. So the *best* way to tell if FTA TV is going to be worth it to you. It's largely a joke in the US, but a slightly more serious deal in other countries. Lyngsat also has a precompiled list of Free TV in the "US", although it still shows satellites you can't see over here. Still, it's a good way of having some idea of what you'd get. TL;DR: if you're not an immigrant that speaks a foreign language or a very religious person, there's next to nothing worth watching on FTA satellite in the US; I do not know for sure if the "local" channels that are uplinked to satellites are actually FTA or not; since they control the distribution of them I'd have to say the list is incorrect. Maybe it's not.
I did some research into this when I was first transitioning to a LCD HDTV. At the time there wasn't quite enough to make the transition worth it. Now between Hulu, Netflix, FTA antenna tv, and a few other streaming sources I'm looking at this again to fill the gaps. DVB-S is supported by WMC and would offer you a descent way to combine Antenna and FTA Satellite services. Take a look into this if you find the DVR included with your kit lacking. I am not sure if you could set this up with MythTV and XBMC. You can add a motorized mount to this kit if you find you need it. If you are doing a roof mount you may want to order it now. The extra cost now may be worth not having to scale your home twice. If you're doing a deck mount then no worries! ;)
Coffee: The lifeblood of intelligence in civilization.
It's the same thing in Canada. Even flyers have mixed units. I saw a tile cutter on sale at Canadian Tire, which had the following specifications: can cut tiles up to 12" wide, 12 mm thick.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
My wife and I live on a boat in Europe and have used satellite tv - free to air - for around 15 years. Receive about 340 channels from Astra 2 of which around 100 are worth having - news, drama, documentary, film, old show re-runs etc. Our dish is 85cm and receiver an (now) old Technomate which can pick up any satellite available so we have cover of thousands of programmes from Korea to Brazil. As we cruise rivers and canals we have to retune daily by rotating dish and varying up-angle for different satellites.
I live in Europe. I have a motorized dish that I use daily and depending on the languages you may speak, you might find interesting FTA channels. Nevetheless there is too much junk on FTA (sex-phonelines, shopping channels and low-quality programming). However, on 28.2E, depending on your location you might be able to watch many free, and some decent, UK channels. Also, hundreds of arabic channels from nothern africa and the middle-east are available on Nilesat, 7W, and Badr (somewhere around 30E). Also, on 19.2E (Astra) you will find most German FTA channels, and in 13E there is Hotbird, with many FTA channels from Italy.
VDR: http://linuxtv.org/vdrwiki/index.php/Introduction
Linux based DVR for DVB-x devices
OpenPLI: http://openpli.org/
software for STBoxes below
forum: http://www.i-have-a-dreambox.com/wbb2/
STB Hardware:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vu+
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreambox (deprecated)
The best part of TVRO/FTA systems was finding wild feeds: syndicated programming being delivered to locals (many times a whole season at a time for re-run tv shows), news & sports remotes (loved hearing reporters and PBP announcers when they weren't "on-air"), corporate video distribution, teleconferences, etc... Sadly it has been 20 years since I've been able to play with such...MMDS systems were also fun to hack (the service no longer exists, I believe -or at least all the operators went out of business), my local one was too cheap to scramble everything (didn't want to have to provide a descrambler for each customer if they didn't subscribe to premium programming), so if you had a 2.8 GHz to something your TV could tune (it was transmitted in VSB) downconverter you could get quite a bit, there was also channels in that band used for tele-education, so one could watch some university classes, etc.. Cheap, abundant IP bandwidth has moved many of those off satellite and microwave, so there isn't as much as there used to be...If we could implement IP multicasting effectively internet wide, we would see even less satellite distribution.
> Amazingly enough even in the depths of Slashdot,
> there appear to have been no postings or
> discussions about it.
Because it was old news when the site was founded?
The Scroungers Guide to Satellite TV
By Gary Bourgois
Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, The Birdwatcher's Report
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Well gee, I don't know, my big motorized dish is pretty useless since all the birds are ciphered and there's just no way on Earth to even crack the codes.
So, I just modded mine to TX instead of just RX and beamed out some Welcome to Earth messages to the alien planets we've discovered.
Yep. That's all it's for. Total coincidence if Gliese 581 just happened to be around the same declination and right ascension as ECHOSTAR 7 was when I last listened for a reply.
The Internet has got a lot more content on demand, or even off demand, I hear. Maybe I'll get tired of maintaining it and cover it in bits of mirror to assume Form Of: Solar Death Ray -- if the squirrels or flying drones keep acting up... I just hate ants.
What else can you do with 'em?
We have that with tire measurements - 205/45R17 is a 205mm wide tire with a 0.45*205=92 mm sidewall, made for a 17 INCH rim.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
You just found out about this? Where were in in the 1970s when people were putting Arecibo sized dishes in their backyards?
there are a ton of **free** streaming sites that just host links...
I watch all shows the day they are released
free-tv-video-online.me/
watchfreemovies.ch/
tubepulus.me
many others
Thank you Dave Raggett
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
I'm a huge British football fan (soccer to you Yanks), and a few years back the only way to get certain matches (if I didn't want to totally blow up my cable setup) was on a satellite system called Globecast, which carried an Irish subscription sports channel called Setanta. So I had the dish installed. Setanta went out of business, but I still have the dish, pointed at the Galaxy satellite. I get tons of Arabic channels from the Middle East, 10 or so expatriate Persian hip hop video channels from Los Angeles, Nigerian TV (where you can watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in Nigeria), Khazak TV, five channels or Thai and Lao shopping, and lots of US based religious channels. It's free and very very weird.
I dabbled a little few years ago but there really not much interests me. Taking a look at Galaxy 19 lyngsat.com as suggested by Isao has stations of little interest to me. However, it was interesting to get some hands-on experience receiving signals from a satellite, ironically the day I first locked on to bird in the Clarke Belt was the same day Arthur died.
Also back then there were websites that you can download software and load this into one of those sat receivers and be able to watch DishTV, Direct, and other encrypted sites for free. However, these didn't offer much (I have no interest in football, soccer, hockey which all have 200 channels each). There were some premimun channels like TCM that I already have on cable, but then I may also dump cable because even TCM shows same movies over and over again (occasionally they will show something different i.e. a series of Mamie Van Doren movies). There were "local" TV stations from various towns like Bakersfield on these dish tv stations. But then almost all I have no interest so why bother.
Getting back to when I setup my satellite receiver. Someone at DeAnza Electronics flea market was selling DishTV Ku-band dishes and oddball sat receiver boxes for dirt cheap, had a whole stack of these and didn't want to crate them all to the dump. Living in a condo reduced my opportunities (all the birds were aligned away from my windows), I was not interested in mounting the dish on a awning of sorts (I was experimenting and had no long term deployment interest). I was able to just fit the dish into my skylight, borrowed a sat finder meter to help lock onto the bird, and it was exciting to see the bars all light up on the satellite receiver box (Comet I think was the brand). Go through the motions to select the frequencies and download the channels. It seemed it was more interesting technically than watching entertainment (again almost all channels were of no interest). I also referred to these sites, http://www.uksatellitehelp.co.... and http://emantechnology.com/stor.... There were some channels that were non-encrypted including NASA-TV Public channel (and this was back when Shuttle was flying). However these stations were able to do encryption far more difficult to hack, and they also encrypted all channels including "FTA" like NASA-TV.
Now there is C-band birds which NASA-TV provides non-encrypted including the Media channel but the antennas are big and hard to find. However, NASA-TV mostly has usual drivel repeated over and over. There was a time when everyone was dumping C-band dishes for free and great opportunity for experimentalists including those wanting a dish to do EME.
mfwright@batnet.com
No. It's not. Intelligent people get their information from the source, and not biased bloggers and reporters. Your bloggers are not scions of fact. That would be like us using Huffington Post to "prove" something. No reason to do that. It is just another opinion. We don't cite NBC or ABC or any reporter as proof of anything.
Real information comes from records, and not anecdotes, or suspicions. The fact is that you don't know if the ACA will be a net positive or negative because you haven't given it time to even be implemented and the market to adjust. It will be at least 4 years before we know what the effects are. All you have are predictions about how it will ruin the country.
The voting record of congress is a citation you can use for proof. Breitbart is just another person's opinion. They teach this stuff in critical thinking classes. You might check it out. You could learn the difference between a reliable citation source and an opinion.
âoeIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." â Albert Einstein
My guess is that there are Less people who have health insurance now... than before it passed.
There you go guessing again. If you want us to believe all of the doom you are saying, show some real evidence. Just standing hear spouting your guesses doesn't accomplish anything.
âoeIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." â Albert Einstein
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Did anyone else read the the quoted phrase as "I personally settled on the GoaTsePro MicroHD system".
I do not wish to see the corporate logo now.
BonusClicky: Fleshed
Fortec Star receiver with a handy USB port for channel programming and the facility for adding a hard drive (or SSD, flash, whatever) off a standard Sky 90cm dish.
Outlay: £50 for the receiver, £0 for the dish. 5,000 channels and nothing on.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
get two of them and weld them together, make a hang drum. They make a wonderful noise. :)
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
First, you're going to want a motor to point the dish at various satellites in the clarke belt. There's some free programming available on each sat, but not a single sat you're likely to want to use all the time. Info on the sats and where to point your dish is here: http://www.dishpointer.com/
You'll also want to make sure you at least have a Ka and Ku band capable LNB device on your dish. If you ever upgrade to a fullsize dish you can also pull in channels broadcasting in C band.
I eventually upgraded my dish to a 120cm model for better signal, but never got a fullsize dish. Like I said in the title I USED to have an FTA setup. IMO it was a pain in the ass. Hardly ever found anything I wanted to watch, and I spent countless hours setting things up and keeping them working. Good luck getting local anything. You're not going to be getting HBO or anything like that without some kind of pay service (or a hack). It was a constant hassle to scan for birds that I could pick up, scan for channels on that bird, then go and see what was on the bird.
That logic fails to account for the VAST majority who don't set their savings aside, or those who are on bare-bones plans they don't understand. Beyond that, what if you get hurt/sick before you've had time to save up? I'm not arguing for "Cadillac" plans, just plans with coverage to prevent you from being a ward of the state, no matter when a bad event happens. People with inadequate insurance who can afford adequate insurance are NOT being responsible people.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
So being responsible == having enough income to make high savings?
Even then, what if you have a $30k income (that would be about a typical US american income) and save $3k per year, and then you have a $250k surgery (uh, that's probably very generous).. With 30 years of savings you're short by $160k. Sounds about doable if you move into a trailer, slash your expenditures on food and other products, and pay debt for a couple decades.
Unless you have a fully paid off, owned house which you can sell to pay for the surgery, but that's asking much if you have $30K income and savings. But it sounds barely doable.
Now, what if the surgery and treatment is $750k.. hahahaha
You write the checks each month, we (the taxpayers) write the check when you have a baby that spends a month in the nicu, or you drop a tree on yourself playing lumberjack.
Cheap storage VM.
Used it overseas during my career and most English channels were encrypted/subscription. Only English free channels I saw were news (occasionally) and infomercials. Years ago I read that there were sidebands on the C-band signals that contained radio and data but never investigated it.
> Never the less Linux has excellent support for various DVB/ATSC hardware.
One reason for this is that many receivers (set top boxes) use Linux as their internal OS.
-_- I posted to the wrong story. Gah.