Before there was Direct TV and DISH TV there were “Big Ugly Dishes.” These were satellite dishes that were huge.
Just wondering if anyone on this board had one or knew of people with one and were able to watch it.
What kinds of things did you like about it? Is there anything left on it? Googling around I came up with a few religious type of channels still carried as well as a few local channels.
My previously city-ified cable loving family moved to the country (well, a subdivision not served by cable) in 1991.
We paid extra to get broadcast network programming…WABC out of New York, WXIA (NBC) out of Atlanta, WBBM (CBS) out of Chicago (later they changed to the Raleigh affiliate). We got to see the local coverage of the first World Trade Center attack on WABC, while the NY stations were all knocked off the broadcast air locally because of the transmitters were on the towers. Must have been a Fox station too, but I don’t remember it.
Mid-afternoon on otherwise “empty” channels you’d occasionally get local news reports from various places around the country being distributed nationally.
I’m pretty sure NFL games were available in the clear in those days…I don’t recall us having trouble following the Packers games.
Oh, and once in a blue moon, the block on the porn channels would fail and hey, free soft-core porn!
I also remember being sent out to the backyard to knock the snow off the dish…
Had one, many years ago. What I liked, I suppose, was that it actually got us some channels. We lived way out in the sticks, and before the mini-dishes came around, cable was the only game around; if cable didn’t reach to where you lived, you made do with over-the-air TV.
The dish package my parents subscribed to actually had the Sci-Fi Channel before I had it (by that time, I’d moved away for college). I had cable from a provider that didn’t carry the channel. And when Mystery Science Theater went off Comedy Central and moved to Sci-Fi, I had no other way of seeing it. I had Mom tape the show for me on Saturdays and mail me the tapes, or I picked 'em up over holidays.
One other memory, and a confession: porn. Apparently, at one point, someone in my parents’ household subscribed to a porn channel and locked it with a code. Not knowing the code, I figured a way around it: I deleted the satellite from the receiver’s memory, then re-added it without moving the dish. The re-added satellite worked just fine, and no more lock. Free porn for a week, wahoo! Of course, I’m sure the missing lock was discovered after I left, but strangely, no one ever mentioned it.
Back in the early days, circa late 80s to late 90s, all of the feeds on these things were completely free. I had a friend who could get something like 100 channels! We were amazed.
They came with servo mounts and all you had to do was dial in the satellite and then flip through the many offerings. At that time, living in a rural area this was the only option other than conventional TV antennae: on which you could get maybe 4 channels.
My mom moved to a small mountain town in North Carolina in 1989 and could not get anything without a satelite.
The dish was huge, easily 6 feet and a heavy fiberglass, and it moved to catch different satelites. Tough to channel surf, but it got all kinds of stuff that I hadn’t seen before. Network feeds of prime time shows in the middle of the day with no commercials, newscasters picking their noses during commerical breaks, and two comedy channels before the merged into what you might call Comedy Central today.
we had a big one. It was kind of frustrating because we couldn’t get local station clearly so our evening viewing habits were earlier than everyone elses. I believe we watched the network feeds out of Denven? Chicago?
…oh also… first BJ I ever saw was when the fish was realigning it passed over a porno channel feed.
I thought- “that blonde girl sure does like that fudgecicle…ohh…”
When I bought my house in 1993, it had one of those. I bought my house from the former sports editor of the local newspaper and he had used it to watch games from all over the place. It was a huge beast made out of aluminum and it was a pain in the ass to use. Also, it only got some types of satellites and not others. By the early 90’s pretty much everything was scrambled so it was next to useless.
Eventually, I found a guy who was willing to remove it for free. He owned an organic farm out in the sticks and he was going to train it on a satellite that broadcast a Mexican station so he could play it for his workers in their dorms.
Now I have a little tiny one from DirecTV that does so much more it’s ridiculous.
My grandfolks had one. I never so much as changed the channel because it looked complicated as fuck all.
All of their channels had alphanumeric codes like G36 and when you changed the channel w/ the remote, the dish actually moved to pick up a different network satellite.
It seems like they actually had to rotate the dish throughout the day for a single station. Like, NBC would show up fine in the morning but you had to turn the dish a little (different Gxx channel) to pick up the network satellite in the evening.
I’ll let you folks in on a secret - BUD is alive and doing great!
I support a couple of sports bars. I do all their TV installations, satellites, computers, security cameras - all their technology. The older of the two has twenty-four 42" plasmas, two 50" ones and a pair of 120" projectors. The newer one has roughly the same number of plasmas and a stunning 135" 6000 lumen projector every bit as bright as the four plasmas surrounding it. Every single plasma and projector has a dedicated DirecTV receiver, cable feed and in-house modulator feed, meaning every single set can show a different HD program - a very nice feature during the football and college basketball play-offs. (Note: I don’t watch any sports myself. My interest ends with getting the game on the screen. And getting a check.)
But the real secret weapon is the 12’ BUDs on the roof (three at the old location, one at the new).
Why?
Because all those C and Ku satellites are still up there, and still carrying programming - if you know how to receive it. You move the dish to the right position and set the polarization. You see snow. But that is actually a digital signal. Split the C and Ku feeds out to a pair of inputs on a switch and feed it to a DVB receiver. Set the DVB receiver to the right settings for the LNB, satellite frequency, bitrate and PIDs (I didn’t say it was easy) do a “blind scan” and a world of “free to air” programming will appear.
The transponder that used to carry a single analog signal now carries two HD ones, or thirty or more SD ones. It carries “backhaul” feeds of sporting events. It carries events blacked out in your area on both DirecTV and your local OTA and cable. It carries channels that you cannot subscribe to because they carry only “local” sports feeds for somebody else’s locality.
We have SD DVB receivers. We have HD ones. We import them from Europe so when they break down I have to fix them (does no one make a decent capacitor any more?) We need a TV in the office with the vanishing “picture-by-picture” feature so we can see the interface of the old C/Ku receiver on one side and the new DVB receiver on the other, to tweek the polarizer and bump the dish left and right.
We obviously cannot advertise the fact that we have all these options. But sports fans know that our place is where serious fans go. They know we’ll be the one place that has that game.
And we owe it all to BUD.
I have a ten foot dish and a 4DTV receiver as well as a six foot dish and an analog receiver. There is very little left on analog, but as Gaffa mentioned, the analog receiver can be used to point for DVB. DVB is mostly foreign programs; I receive Al Jazeera English.
I saw Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Voyager and much of Enterprise on feeds; the signal sent by satellite to the network affiliate without commercials days before it was broadcast.
I also have DishNetwork, which fails in a heavy rain. 4DTV does not. 
There are a vast number of foreign language channels, but an even vaster number of English language ones. You just have to know where to look.
A few of my memories from the late 80s-early 90s.
Getting the backhaul for Monday Night Football games. Announcer microphones were still cut off during the commercial breaks, but the cameramen were good at finding the pretty girls in the stands.
Finding Prime Sports’ (now Fox Sports Net) PAC-10 volleyball game of the week probably really ignited my love of vollyeball (the fact that redheaded hottie Heather Cox was announcing probably helped as well)
When I was home for the summer from college, I remember finding the channel where, late night on Friday, Fox broadcast their cartoon lineup for the next morning, and taping the original X-Men series.
During that short-lived coup attempt against Gorbachev in the waning days of the Soviet Union, I remember scanning through channels and finding what looked like it may have been an uplink from a city street in the area. Not 100% sure of that, and nothing really happened when I was watching, but it seemed cool at the time.
There is lyngsat.
I’m not into sports, although I did see some Australian football. They play it in their underwear, and you can’t throw the ball forwards. You have to carry it through those seven big ugly guys standing in front of you in their underwear.
There was one wuss wearing a leather helmet.
I was standing inside the ten foot dish once when my Ex decided to watch Animal Planet and the dish began to rotate.
Picture the Plant standing at the top of a ten foot step ladder, adjusting the LNB (the thingie at the focus of the dish). The hell is that noise? OH SHIT!
The only time I got down a ladder faster was when I was laying concrete block and a wasp flew under my shirt.
G1, transponder 5 still has Classic Arts Showcase. Sort of a UTube of the arts. It has old movie clips, Jazz, Opera, Classical music with neat looking film. That is where I learned about Siegfried’s Tod.
My best friend as a kid had one of those giant satellite dishes and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I especially loved that you could rotate it with a remote controller from inside the house.
I find BUDs to be appealing because it’s just cooler to receive signals from a satellite orbiting around in space and catch them with a device in your yard, than to get the signal from a boring humdrum cable that just runs underneath the ground. To a kid who was fascinated with technology, I thought it was just the coolest thing ever, and I still think it’s pretty goddamn cool.
My grandparents had a big dish in the 1980s at their farm in West Virginia. Before the dish, they could only pick up 2 local channels with an antenna.
I loved hunting for things on the dish. Nothing was blocked. I remember watching Footloose three times in one day because it was on different HBO feeds.
There was also free porn. I remember when I was a kid, my grandparents and I were watching TV when the power went out. When it came back one, the dish would go to channel 1 on whatever sat. it was pointed at. That night, channel 1 just happened to be a porn channel. I have never seen my grandfather move so fast to find the remote.
West Virginia boy chiming in. I remember them well from the 80s. Remember when a solid red color came, it was filled with lines and buzzes and pops?
When we got ours it was when feeds first started scrambling their signal. As a boy, I could look around enough to find the unscrambled feeds on different satellites. Especially the porn channels. As a 12 year old I found them astounding
Also in the winter, I remember having to brush the snow off of them. And I remember the cameramen at ballgames focusing on nice titties.
It was on that dish that I DID watch the Challenger explode on live NASA TV… I ran and hugged my mom after they said that it had exploded…
A watched a girls beach volleyball feed. A remote truck with cameras and a dish goes to a remote event and sends video to a satellite and hence to the network or TV station.
The cameraman had a closeup of a bikinied ass. With C Band you could see individual grains of sand. He pulled away from the view very quickly, probably chided by his director.
News feeds were often sent by C Band. You could see reporters practicing their speeches and picking their noses in between.
Still got one mounted out back, though it isn’t used anymore.
As others have mentioned, the backhaul feeds were great. Got to see a lot of what the sports commentators and reporters in the field are doing when everyone else is in commercial.
I remember we were seaching the backhauls one day when nothing special was on. We came across a live helicopter feed from California where they were (slowly) chasing a white Bronco down the highway. I think we watched the infamous OJ Simpson chase for about half and hour before the networks ever started showing it.
Ventura College (the local community college) had a BUD, and we watched Laker playoff games (once the motors found the right satellite) on the raw feed to the affiliates. During the commercial breaks people would mutter, bang things, and the video would jump between replay shots. The replay players would run forwards and backwards as telestrator marks appeared on them.
Then all the extraneous noises would stop, and the color guy would start: “You see Byron Scott here breaking for the basket as Magic Johnson takes the ball…”