Why do some people still have those big ass satelite dishes in their backyard?

Factual Questions
41

The BUD is still the best tool out there to get sports feeds. It’s the secret weapon of the best sports bars.

They usually receive both C and Ku band satellites. C is older, and lower powered. Ku is newer, and Dish and DirecTV are basically small, fixed Ku dishes. But a BUD can move from satellite to satellite (as can some small Ku dishes).

Back in the heyday of the BUD, all the signals were analog and unscrambled. Then they started using a scrambling system called VideoCypher. The first one was cracked, so they launched VideoCypher II. There are still VCII signals up there. But when digital encoding became cheap enough for home use, they started sending digital signals up instead of analog ones. So instead of having only one TV channel per each of the 24 “transponders”, they could now have dozens in the form of a digital “bouquet”. This system is called DVB for Digital Video Broadcast. A form of this technology is used for over-the-air TV in Europe.

The 1-meter dishes you see in ethnic neighborhoods in the US are hooked to DVB receivers, getting programming in different languages. A lot of this programming is encrypted and they pay for access, but a huge percentage is Free To Air (FTA), supported by ads. All of this stuff can be received by a DVB receiver hooked to a C/Ku dish.

Where the real fun starts is that virtually all network uplinks are unencrypted DVB transmissions. If you know what satellite and frequency the signal is going to appear on, you can use a type of DVB receiver with a “Blind Search” feature to scan for network feeds. Most are standard definition, but a substantial number are in HD. And since they are intended to be received by a network affiliate or a network, decoded, and have effects and graphics applied to them, and re-encoded they start out at a very high level of quality. Cable transmission of an HD feed is usually only 9 to 11 megabits per second. The best OTA HD transmission is 19.2 mb/sec. But network HD feeds can be as high as 35 mb/sec. It looks amazing.

So, that guy who still has that big old ugly dish? He’s watching channels you can’t find on DirecTV, Dish or any cable company. He’s watching blacked-out games. He’s watching stuff I can’t talk about without violating board rules. And he’s laughing his fool head off.

As you might guess, I’m pretty much an expert in this area and have equipped a sports bar’s 3 12’ C/Ku dishes with these receivers.

42

The Sun is about 0.5 degrees across, the same angular size as a circle about 0.5 meters across at 55 meters. The mirrors in Sakkas’s experiment are all larger than that, but if they are flat, a person standing on the boat would just see one reflection of the Sun in each mirror, with the reflection being the same size as the Sun. (The mirror would need to be slightly concave for the person to see the entire mirror lit up.)

With 70 mirrors, there would be the equivalent of 70 Suns visible from the boat. The mirrors wouldn’t be perfectly reflecting, but if they reflect 90 percent of the energy, you’d still have the equivalent energy of 63 Suns. I could believe that could set something on fire.

43

Ah, okay, that makes sense. Essentially, the target would ultimately become the same temperature as the sun (ignoring burning, etc).