Ask Slashdot: Experiences With Free To Air Satellite TV? 219
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?"
April First????? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:April First????? (Score:5, Insightful)
In case that`s no prank; depending on where you live, the required operations to obtain the feed might be illegal. Where I live, there`s 3 months of summers where trees block a lot of the signal and rain just cut it, and 6 WINTER MONTHS (sorry had to vent about this weekend extra feet of snow) where the antenna won`t pickup anything because of the snow. So yeah, we didn`t use that much before just selling all of it back.
Re:April First????? (Score:5, Insightful)
Last year was terrible, with most of the stories being along the lines of "lulz, windows announces it's using windows kernel". I don't mind a clever joke, but most of it was just plain stupid.
There was a lot of complaining about it, so I'm assuming they've decided to take it easy this year. Personally I'm grateful.
Not so amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
It was old news before this site started so that's probably why it hasn't been discussed.
what are you a District Attorney? (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
Re:April First????? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone with a modern install dont even need heaters. the new eastern arc is so steep on the dish that a coat of car wax will keep it snow and ice free even when I got 6 feet of snow overnight this past winter.
99% of the people bitching about Sat TV are clueless people that haven't touched it on 3 decades.