If it can still move and receive signals, you can get a DVB receiver and get a world of programming.
If that’s the case, then why couldn’t a smaller dish be pointed at these other satellites? Do the LNBs not work with some other frequencies these other satellites are using? They’re obviously able to get a strong enough signal from the DirecTv satellite, so what’s keeping them (with a different receiver) from doing the job of a BUD?
The small dishes use Ku frequencies, the large ones C Band. Direct TV and Dish network indeed use different LNBs, and are encoded to boot.
DVBs can use small dishes. Some of them are fixed, although you can get moveable ones to use different satellites. BUDs are often free if you will take them away; my 6’ was “free” when I bought a replacement receiver on EBay. Of course, we had to drive to Louisiana to get it…
“That’s what she said” to everything posted so far. And this:
The thing I loved about my cousin’s was…
“Oh we missed the east coast feed, we’ll catch it in a half hour on the west coast feed.”
I had a BUD for a while and the backhauls were our favorites. I remember one time when we found the backhaul from some ice skating tournament in Atlanta that was slated to be on Wide World of Sports later that day. We watched the compulsories then after a break the freestyle, then the winner was declared, the medals were handed out and everyone started to leave. The camera stayed on, though and, being busy I didn’t change the channel or shut it off. After about ten minutes a graphic went up that showed the standings at the midway point, and the there was a shot of the commentators in tight so you couldn’t see the stands were mostly empty. They talked about the standings then pointed out that the girl in third place (who won in the final) would “really have to pull all the stops if she is to have any chance of winning.” I guess predicting is easy after the fact.
I guess the small dish companies have done a good job in trying to kill the big dish. I still have a 7 foot c-band dish and wouldn’t have anything else. All the programming and more you get on the small dish is still on the big dish. You have to have a 4DTV receiver now since almost everything has shifted to digital, almost nothing left on the old analog channels. I was just this evening looking at the Direct TV and Dish Network channels that you pay for and noticing that a lot of their listed channels are free channels on the big dish. I guess it makes their list look longer. My mom has Dish Network and I counted about 40 channels that I would call pay channels that a person might watch. For about the same money I counted almost 80 channels that I pay for on the big dish programming. The picture is much better with the big dish since it’s not compressed like the small dish signal and it doesn’t go out when it rains. There are also some Ala Carte programs available. I have a HD decoder so I get high definition also. You can check out callnps.com for programming prices or there are many other providers still offering programming. The bottom line is I get twice the amount of programming that my friends get with their small dishes for about the same price, of course there are some downsides to the big dish but for me it’s all about saving money.
FX is only on the pizza dishes; the reason I spent more on Dish Network to see Thief and The Riches.
Just out of curiosity how much space much you allocate for a BUD? Are they hard to anchor? Or maintain?
Also if anyone wants to chime in about things like lag time in channel changing or whatever, it’d be interesting to hear.
There is a three foot deep hole about eight inches across filled with concrete to hold the post the dish is mounted on. I dug the hole for my second dish without much effort.
There needs to be clearance for a ten foot dish to move from East to West, say through ninety degrees of arc.
You need a view of the Southern sky for the whole arc, that is moving the dish from East to West to see as much of the Clarke Belt as possible. It takes time to move form satellite to satellite, but most of the programming is now on W5. One provder now supports a BUD that sees only W5 and does not move.
With my Pizza dish I need only see two satellites in the belt and not move, but I can’t watch that TV when it rains.
The BUD needs to be realigned every few months, but that is easy with software on the receiver. I just punch some buttons on a remote rahter than go out into the snow and cold to move a ten foot of six foot dish.
Back in NW Ohio the family of a buddy of mine in middle and early high school (82-83ish) had one. I’d go over on Saturday afternoons and watch wrestling or boxing out of Atlanta.
I thought it was the coolest thing in the world and pleaded with Dad to get one. Dad said there wasn’t anything worth watching on the five channels we already got, why did I think it would improve if there were 200?
The only other family in my hometown that had one was a crew of notorious welfare scammers. They could have been the poster children for the welfare opponents back then claiming recipients were living high on the hog with Caddys and satellite dishes.
I actually spent a summer (1993, TBE) in a small town in Mississippi, and a family that I spent a lot of time with had one. Pretty much all they got was a Canadian MTV-like channel, and…
wait for it…
the insane “preaching” of some guy who wore a Catholic priest’s garb while smoking huge stogies and lighting them with a lighter shaped like a gun.
:eek:
Gene Scott, I believe. His non subscription channel was a marker for aligning dishes.
Wasn’t it also possible to get live, raw feeds of certain events with those dishes? Like stuff that wasn’t even supposed to be broadcast but was just showing what the cameras were showing?
Sporting events were popular. I recall watching some ladies play beach volleyball.
The cameraman was focused one one ladies derriere, and hastily pulled away from it, probably being yelled at by the producer.
My parents owned a satellite TV business from 1982 to 2002, and I worked for them in every possible capacity during my undergrad and immediately post-undergrad years. I was pretty much there from the birth of the industry to its development into what it is now.
Yes, W5.
In the 1980s, when I was a teenager, my aunt and uncle lived in rural Pennsylvania and had a big dish. I can vividly remember flipping through the channels and finding MTV, which was a new channel that I had heard about but never seen. I specifically remember seeing the videos for Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime, and Gary Numan’s Cars. I’m pretty sure these were the first music videos I had ever seen. IIRC this was during the “I Want my MTV” era - cable TV was a relatively new thing in urban areas, and many cable companies didn’t offer MTV as a channel yet. I remember thinking MTV was pretty much the coolest thing I had ever seen, but I couldn’t convince the adults in the room that this MTV thing was going to be huge.
My father-in-law had one (actually, he still does but it doesn’t work) along with a hacked receiver that would decrypt all of the encrypted channels. I believe the guy that sold it to him went to jail for a while.
Ah, the gargantuan satellite dish.
Otherwise known as the state flower of West Virginia.
I recall an early article in perhaps Popular Electronics where the dish was pointed at a single satellite and mounted in concrete.