When I was a kid, I was fascinated by them. I wanted one ever since I saw them. I have a Dish Network system, which is pretty cool, but I still wish I had a large one. The main advantage, in my opinion, was that you could aim the old style dishes at a satellite, whereas the Dish Network is fixed on the Dish Network Satellite (Or, since Echostar owns the company, maybe it’s an Echostar satellite.)
Anyway, I thought that maybe with the advent of the mini type dish, the old ones didn’t exist any more, but sometimes when I go somewhere out in the country side, like if my wife and I go to the coast, we pass houses that still have the large dishes. So does this mean that large dishes are still manufactured, and you can still get large dish programming packages? I tried looking this up in Google, but all I ever get are Dish Network, or Direct TV references.
A friend of mine who has one in northern VT said it’s unclear whether it’ll be worthwhile to keep his after this year. The satellites are carrying fewer and fewer stations, this year in particular more channels are dropping out of the system.
It’s too bad that these bigger dishes are going the way of the dodo. We had one growing up, and I loved it. Not only could you get porn on it (which, to a teenage boy, was the best thing in the world), but the other stuff I was able to see was very interesting, too: news feeds where you could see the people being interviewed joking around with technicians before the broadcast, TV shows a week ahead of schedule (with no commercials), bull fights on Mexican TV, boxing from far corners of the earth, the Canadian Broadcasting Channel (with its endless reruns of WKRP and Kids in the Hall), etc. I loved the thing. Then we moved my senior year (1994) and got a DirectTV dish, and it sucked in comparison. The TV quality was better, but it was more expensive and you didn’t get as much stuff. Big dishes, back then, were far superior.
The large dishes were very popular ten or fifteen years ago in the rural and mountainous parts of Vermont, where neither broadcast signals nor cable were terribly widespread. You would see them behind large houses, and, for some reason, in the front yard of trailers.
They were dubbed the “State Flower of the Northeast Kingdom”.
The Northeast Kingdom is a term for to the northeastern three counties of Vermont. The area is beautiful, and quite rural, even by Vermont standards. It tends to be behind the rest of the state economically. By the way, the term was coined by Vermont’s former Governor and Senator George Aiken, who also advised that the US “declare victory and get out” of Vietnam. He had a real knack for a good phrase, he did.
That argument stems from the fact that the analog video on C-band is “pure” whereas DBS signals are compressed with MPEG2. Depending on the bit rate of the MPEG2 stream the quality can be significantly worse than pure analog. However, much (most?) of what’s currently available on big dish systems is digital now, too, so that’s becoming less and less of a valid argument.
I have wanted a big-dish system since I was a kid, and I still want one. Now that I’m (theoretically) a grownup and have my own house, I just might get one, too. But I’m a radio/electronics geek and I’m not just interested in run-of-the-mill TV delivered by a different means. I’d use the dish for more obscure stuff like SCPC (what little is left), Inmarsat, weather satellites, amateur radio, etc.
You can see the delay betwen some C Band and the DBS. Dishnetwork takes the C Band feed and sends it to their satellite to send to me.
When I replaced my analog receiver on Ebay, the guy was giving the dish away, he was close enough and Mrs. Plant didn’t mind our taking her van to get it.
If you get a used dish close enough to bring home, it will be aligned for your area and you just point it South.
Yeah, that’s the way I feel too. Although I don’t know if I could afford it. Plus, I’m not sure it one would be allowed where I live. I know, when I read about prices, 10 to 15 years ago, the dishes were pretty spendy, $1,000 or more, on average, and “cheep” ones selling for around $500. At least that’s what I remember.
Bummer. When thinking about the large satellite systems, one thing I remember was the huge selection of channels. And the programming packages seemed really cheep too. Of course I’m remember all of this from 10 to 20 years ago, but I was really impressed. I mean, there was a lot more selection than cable, and even now, the mini dish packages, 150 channels, where 40 of them are blank screens that play music and you have 5 weather channels, and so on :rolleyes: .
I remember looking through satellite TV guides and thinking how cool it was that for all of the subscription channels, there were free ones that offered the same types of programming. For instance, instead of paying for MTV or VH1, I saw a channel, I think I remember it being called Video Hits USA. And even though I’m not a sports fan, if I had a dish and didn’t want to pay for ESPN, there were lots of alternatives, like ProAm sports network. Plus, the ability to see channels from other countries would have been cool. And of course, if I would have ever bought a big dish, it wouldn’t be complete without a decoder box
But, Dish Network isn’t too bad, although my wife and I spend 95% of our time watching VH1 Classics, which alone was worth the $10/month package upgrade
[Sat Geek] Some Persian gulf military video was sent to the USA by in the clear C Band. I didn’t see it, dammit.
Did see Al Jazeera sending feeds life to other networks though.
[/Sat Geek]
I used to, but damned if I know where any of them are now. I know the type of signal you want is HRPT (high resolution picture taking) and that it’s around 1600 Mhz, so do some Google searching on HRPT and throw in a few other keywords to narrow the search a bit (I’d try things like NOAA and receiver to start, and maybe GOES, a name for some of the HRPT-capable satellites).
That’s a good idea; I should try that. I’m in Florida and there are still a lot of those old, BUD’s around this area. I’m sure people want to get rid of them. I’d like a big one (12’ or so) in order to get the international satellites well. Another advantage to living in Florida is that the geostationary arc is high in the sky and I can get pretty close to the horizon, which is great for international sats as well.
Funny you should mention that - my two biggest considerations when I was shopping for my house was 1) availability of high-speed internet access, and 2) no restrictions on antenna structures or big satellite dishes. I’m such a geek. I refused to even look at homes in a bunch of “deed restricted” developments around here specifically because of the antenna/dish issue.
Well, since my wife and I own the house, and the land it’s on, and since there’s no neighborhood association with any restrictions, I’m not worried about that, but I don’t know if we’d need permission from the city, like getting a permit or something. But, actually, I shouldn’t say that I’m worried, since I’m not trying to acquire one at the moment.
Some are, some aren’t. I think for the low-earth-orbit sats you might actually need a tracking setup, but then you don’t need the high gain provided by the big dish (you can get away with smaller antennas). Some of the GOES sats are in geostationary orbit and you can just point the dish and go.
It generally costs less for a BUD. You can buy single channels or packages. When Dish Network lost Comedy Central for a short while, I bought it on the BUD for $10.00 a year. The card in Dishnetwork works only on one recevier. You can stick the descrambler module from a CBand receiver into another receiver and retain your programming.
There are fewer channels now on CBand.
You have to wait for the dish to move from one satellite to another.
That’s funny.