Ask Slashdot: Experiences With Free To Air Satellite TV?

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?"

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Re:Its pretty good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or in other words, the poster forgot there are readers that are NOT in the US when posting, and there are commenters who didn't realise this guy was talking about the US. In the UK you call a dish installer, get a Freesat box and Elizabeth's your Queen. In the US? You bend over for the monopoly du jour and whatever they managed to lobby this time.

It does work

[SlickNic]

I grew up with this as my only source of TV in the 80s and 90s (we were too far from town and lived in the mountains to use local over the air tv). We had an 8' dish though and it must have weighed well in excess of 26lbs so yes your dish is quite light. We never seemed to have issues finding channels with something to watch and were able to pickup news, cartoons (very important), shows, and movies. The main issue was that the channels had to be scanned manually then. There were two sets of numbers, the first number if I remember correctly would physically rotate the dish outside then the second number would scan the channel options available available at that dish angle. This took a lot of time and ended up with us writing down the common locations for shows that we wanted to watch. Today I would hope there is an auto-scan feature that would allow you to just scan the channels to see what you're able to receive and store those. Unfortunately I haven't used this system in more than 10 years so I'm not very knowledgeable on what the system is like to use today. Hopefully something in my post was useful to you or someone else reading through.

Dish/Direct TV should offer free basic channels

[bigpat]

The satellite providers should provide some free basic tv with no monthly fees and just charge the full cost of equipment or allow people to use their own equipment and then make the additional revenue on the advertising side. Other paid cable channels could be an up sell with monthly subscriptions or pay per view. If the satellite providers presented a sufficiently attractive mix of advertising supported channels for cord cutters, then it would be a no brainer for people just to add satellite to their household mix of entertainment options for a couple hundred bucks worth of equipment. The number of viewers would go up by many millions. It really would be an opportunity for a win for the public and a big win for the satellite companies.

A better selection of free over the air advertising supported broadcasts are something that is really missing from the current market.

Re:It does work

[LoRdTAW]

I had a friend whose family had a house in the mountains. They had TVRO and a BUD, I think there were two boxes one was some kind of amplifier or power injector and the other was the actual tuner.

Every so often they had to have the dish realigned to the satellites or something like that. They would pay a satellite technician something like one hundred dollars to come in and perform the alignment. He would actually chase everyone out of the room to perform his magical feat of calibration. My friend hid a video camera to see what the guy was doing (back then it was a tough ordeal as they used VHS tapes and were enormous). Turns out they guy simply went into a menu and punched in some numbers that were available in the monthly guide. My friends father ripped the guy a new asshole after he found out he was taken for a ride.

The fun part about BUD TV was you could receive uplinks from reporters/camera crews in the field. So you see a reporter standing there playing with his tie, conversing, picking his nose etc. Then suddenly he would stiffen up and a few seconds later make his report, go silent, ask if he was finished and then walk off camera. The feed would either continue for some time or go blank.