Just Sharing This How I got into the "Satellite Scene" - please contribute your own experiences!

Riverblue

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On the back of finding out what people do for a living I was wondering how folks interest in "satellites" started? Whether from a professional background or purely hobbyist?

Personally mine started with the DTT switch over in the UK. I was researching how DTT would affect me at my location and what I would get out of it when I came across Freesat and receiving my TV via satellite. I did more research into what was needed, how to install the equipment and how to set it up, that's when I discovered this forum :D .Then I just bought all the bits I needed and fitted it myself. I had no problems and it all went smooth as could be, all the tutorials and the advice on this site were excellent and very helpful, it just requires a bit of time to seek it all out. Once it was all set up and working I started regularly visiting the forum and discovered that there was a lot more to satellite TV than just Freesat. I'd enjoyed researching, installing and setting up my Freest dish that I decided to go for a motorised dish as well to watch football on and that was it, my "hobbyist" interest began.

I have to say that this forum has been foremost in helping out with my interest and although I do visit a few other sites, this is without doubt the best. You get such a diverse cross section of subject matter and opinions on this site and people are genuinely helpful, there's some good banter as well. :D
 

Analoguesat

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TM 5402HD
Sky+ UK.
My Location
Scottish Borders
I got interested in what else is out there when my parents got Sky analogue 25 odd years ago.

I quickly found the German channels FAR more interesting than the UK rubbish :D

A couple of copies of Wotsat amazed me as to what was out there & I was hooked, although my folks wouldnt let me move the 60cm dish so I could look at the Italian & Arabic channels...... :(

When they went over to Sky Digital I ran off with their redundant analogue gear & started experimenting with the dish propped up on bricks, or in snowdrifts in the winter :D

That battered, rusting old original Sky analogue dish is still in use today - its now our Sky Digital dish & will relocate with us when we eventually move house - I need to be different to everyone else :D
 

Costactc

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My Satellite Setup
3m channel master mesh-24" vonweise actuator-ps1 x2 lnbf(L)-pansat ap3500 positioner-x2 premium III-vu+solo2.
2.4m fortec solid-24" vonweise actuator-esx 241 lnbf(c)-vbox 7 positioner- dm800.
1.2m fortec-24"sj actuator-invacom snh-031--tm 5402 m3.
My Location
Canada
Having previously lived in Greece for a couple of years and hardly any ota channels I figured that satellite was the way to go. I moved to Greece in 1995 for five years and I had bought a 76 cm dish to take. Initially, in 1996, I set it up for Hotbird for Eurosport and CNN. In 1998, I had my first motorised dish installed, 1.4m with an 18" actuator- scanned from about 80E to 43w(Fox was unencrypted at the time so I could get my American football fix). Once I moved back to Canada, I just dabbled in the card share for NA providers until 2006 when I had a 1.2m motorised ku dish installed. That dish was removed shortly thereafter and I installed a 6' commercial PF solid to take its place. I got the itch to test the c band realm and I installed a 3m mesh bud. After moving from Quebec to Ontario, where I have resided ever since- I reinstalled the 6' PF solid and a 3m channel master mesh. Finally, I swapped the 6' solid for an 8' PF solid and I installed a 1.2m motorised dish for ku. In all this time I have tested at least 40 receivers with my favourite being the Pansat sd models and recently the Technomate receivers. I would consider myself a feedhunter who has no interest at all in linux receivers and always looking for a receiver with a fast blind scan and an extremely sensitive tuner.
 

Topper

Amo Amas Amant Admin
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Has gone to a good home elsewhere
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Blackburn, Lancashire
My interest started when I was given a so called redundant BSB mini dish and receiver in the late 80s. Had a friend who had my 1.2 mtr dish before he gave it me and have just picked up stuff here and there, never really spent any money on it as I never have had much spare. I have had lots of fun over the years with all the frequency shifting and decoding methods, but since the encryptions tightened up I lost interest TBH
 

Riverblue

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Seem like I've missed out on the "golden years" of satellites! :(
 

sonnetpete

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My Satellite Setup
Laminas 1.2M fibre dish with an IBU, on a Clarke Tech USALS motor, covering 57E - 24.5W to an Octagon SX88. Displayed on a 20" Dyon LED TV.

Seperate 80 cm dish on 28E with a Humax Freesat for SWMBO.
Free Sat V8 meter. Sony Bravia 46" LCD, Sony BluRay and Home Cinema.
My Location
Normandy, France
Although I began my working career (1967) as a TV engineer, it wasn't till the late 80's (and a change in job from retail to BT) that I became interested in satellite. I'd gone down the Sly route and it wasn't until my young neighbour decided to use my dish as a means to access his flat above mine after a night of clubbing that I found I could do alignments!!!

Nothing much happened until I moved to France with my late wife in 2001 and after astounding her by fixing up a working dish for 28.2E, she reluctantly agreed to me having a 60cm dish of my own on a motor. It was poorly self installed on a less than vertical L mount, though only by making mistakes did I learn how rewarding the hobby can be. The motorised dish was transferred onto a 'proper' mount and grew in size as well. Now that I've been on my own for over 5 years, my present set up goes way beyond what would have been sanctioned. I still find it as rewarding as I did at first and this forum has been an enormous help along the way.
 

zorbua

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My Satellite Setup
Dreambox 8000 HD
Dreambox 800se
Dreambox 900UHD
Clark Tech 5000 HD
Numerous other receivers (Retired)
Dish Gibertini 1.5 M
Dishes Gibertini 1.2 x2
Dish Gibertini 1 M
My Location
Malta
Although I already had more than an inkling way back in 1992 when my company Deutsche Wella brought a massive 11meters complete Satellite system at our work place. What really got me started was when way back in 1996 when I set up a fixed SMW 1.1Dish, with a Analogue (Amstrad) Rx for just Astra 19 & H/B 13E, this was followed then by a Nokia 9200s (grand Rx) which I still have up to today. At that time to be honest I didn't bother much about poles being plumb or whatever, but I got these two birds and I was happy about it. After spending a year stint at Malta Drydocks getting to know about Marine Satcoms, I sort of got more interested in Satellite hobbies ( and this progressed even further) when spending about 4 years with an Italian/Maltese joint venture in VSATS satellite technology. From then on I sort of never looked back and I was really hooked into it.
Today I have 4, different sized Dishes, all motorized, and an assortment of Receivers - the latest being added is an F15 Rx.
I guess feeding hunting, as Costactc said is my first priority.
Oh just almost forgot - almost but - I really appreciate what this forum does to all members new and old and that I have learned much from it and this I say with conviction.
 
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Costactc

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3m channel master mesh-24" vonweise actuator-ps1 x2 lnbf(L)-pansat ap3500 positioner-x2 premium III-vu+solo2.
2.4m fortec solid-24" vonweise actuator-esx 241 lnbf(c)-vbox 7 positioner- dm800.
1.2m fortec-24"sj actuator-invacom snh-031--tm 5402 m3.
My Location
Canada
Although I'm on the other side of the pond where I admin or staff at various sites, this site is my home away from home site and thoroughly enjoy logging in here daily to see what's up.
 

rolfw

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Technomate 5402 HD M2 Ci, DM7000s, Transparent 80cm Dish, Moteck SG2100 DiseqC motor, lots of legacy gear. Meters: Satlook Digital NIT, Promax HD Ranger+ spectrum analyser.
My Location
Berkshire
I also started with a cheap BSB receiver and dish when I was running a pub, got a silly deal not long before they ( BSB ) shut down. Was rekindled when channel five launched on Astra 19.2 and I set up a dish for my sister in France, so that she could at least get one English channel and a few German ones, including Eurosport with English commentary.
 

Analoguesat

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TM 5402HD
Sky+ UK.
My Location
Scottish Borders
Oh and of course Ive had a life long love of analogue kit & ran the analoguesat.co.uk web site for 11 years before the last transmissions were shut down here in Europe in 2012. The website was on line until a week or so back when my former ISP Demon finally got the message I had left them, had cancelled the direct debit and I had no intent of paying them another bent Eurocent for their lousy service (it was hosted throughout on the free space I had with them).
 

Kveys

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My Satellite Setup
125 Gibertini, Stab-120 (30W-86.5E), TM-F3/5/TM-5302HD+230Pf (C-band 40.5W-87.5E)
My Location
Southern Finland
Somehow allways been interesting about foreign countryes. And about 75 I started as a dx-listener (radio). One of my neighbour owned first private satellite dish what I remember and I got exited at once. This was sometimes 89-91 (poor memory these days :) ). As soon as I had money enough I bought my own 120cm prime focus with veeeery funny Nokia stb.

Now there were opened a very new and interesting world inside my living room. Well, some little delays for eg. first I tried to pick satellites from north etc:-rofl2 But few months practise and then I was regularly seen on roof and turning dish manually first years. Not sure but I remembering that Cable and satellite magazin (not wotsat) was 1st usefull info for frequencies and channels. Quite soon I found that there´s also more than normally channels, feeds.

So, then I watching different channels many years on my own. About 2000 I found my first internet sat-forums and 2003 opened our finnish sat-forum Huoltovalikko.

Still today very excited about foreign countryes and 2014 this whole hobby continued to IPTV. Many thousands of interesting channels picked earlier by dishes but now almost all other dreams are on my living room by iptv, including my alltime favourites Latin-America-North America.
 

Vipersan

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My Satellite Setup
IP9000HD +
TD110 Dish and TD88 Dish in Tandem
66°East to 60°West.
AZbox PrmHD + OpnbxS9HD + Skybox + DrHD F15
2x VboxII AZ-EL
2 m+ Alcoa PF + BSC421 C-Band lnbf...
+SS2/TwHnS2-3200 pci/TBS6925 pci
1.5 Fortec Star -Gbox - HtoH Ku/Ka/C
My Location
UK
My Interest in all things 'Broadcast' started when I was but a kid ..
I had a Saturday job at a TV repair shop and was actually fixing TVs by the time I was around 11 years old ..thanks to the excellent tutorage by the TV shop owners.
Prior t0 that even as young as 8 or 9 I was aquiring and fixing radios both valve and later transistors.
..So having access to good teachers ..much equipment and an almost unlimited supply of AV scrap ..I guess it was a very natural progression from Short wave Radio DXing to TV ..and eventually Satellite.
I remember looking at a catalogue with equipment for analogue reception of satellite running into the hundreds ..if not thousands.
Back then even entry level stuff could cost as much as a car.
And so I would visit radio ham fairs ..and scour the pages of 'loot' ....loooking for second hand bargains.
..Loot being where I bought 'Christina'....but by then I'd be in my Early 30s ..
Suddenly dishes became a lot more available and economical with the advent of BSB ...
...my interest peaked as did the 'need' to access everything...and I mean everyhing...
My first half decent Analogue receiver that wasn't second hand being a Strong STR1500
Then came Dmac which ran in parallel with Videocrypt ..and once more I had to save up for a Churchill decoder...
I loved the new format but it wasn't longafter that all platforms were layed open to scrutiny ...and I wanted in ..
I got an offer to re-wire a house my Sister an Hubby bought ..and I worked every hour sent in my spare time to complete the job ..in order to get the neccessary £600 to import a Nokia 9600 ....
I joined a couple of forums with much difficulty ...Digital Networks /Sathackro ..where I leared much and to whom I owe much..
My eagerness to learn continued at a pace ....and at that time I also joined Sats UK ...but had to join again later as my membership lapsed.
At this point I should point out that receiving encrypted channels for me was never about watching TV ..and for the most part this is still true..
We now have so many channels to watch ..but I rarely do.
No ...for me it was always the challenge of what _could_ be done.
My feet/interests these days are firmly in the DX camp again ..
,,and again ...the challenge was there ..
To receive from around the world with whatever I can make do the job..
And so it comes full circle ..
from Short wave DXing to C Ku and now Ka DXing..
To get signals from far away places ..and intercept unedited and unsanitised feeds is and always was my passion.
For me it's less a hobby ..and more of a life choice.
..and one I will always persue as long as the increasing number of spot beams and my health permit.
rgds
VS
 

Lazarus

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My Satellite Setup
80cm Motorised.
Several small Dishes.
Much else.
My Location
North York Moors
I started with Satellite technology back in 1974 upon joining the Design Team for a Shipborne Satellite Comms. System - The challenges back then of dealing with infinitesimally small field strengths using the semiconductor technologies then emerging was immense. Throw into the melting pot the problems of finding and remaining locked onto the relevant Satellite with a Radome that pitched, yawed, skewed and also changed it's global position (albeit relatively slowly) were fascinating.

Over subsequent years serving as an Engineering Officer in the RN, SatComms ((amongst many other Weapons and Sensors applications) were my bread and butter.

But as for hobby TV/Radio Reception, I didn't actually bother until Channel 4 got the contract for Ashes coverage back in the mid 2000s: Our DTT reception didn't extend to Channel 4 then, so I had to find a reliable way of receiving it.
 

2cvbloke

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My Satellite Setup
No satellite stuff for the moment (aside from a 43cm minidish that was on the house already), Samsung SyncMaster T27B550 Smart TV & Monitor, and a few computers...
My Location
Near Pontop Pike, Co. Durham
For me it was wanting to put an old white Amstrad dish with a Blue-cap LNB back into use, never did though cos the dish eventually got torn off the wall and destroyed, it did work for a short while when it was still on the wall, but I guess the LNB couldn't take being used again and failed, I ended up getting $ky for about a year, having an indoor dish aimed out the attic window which was about as reliable as a politician's promises, but I had more fun with finding analogue stuff with my first Pace MSS-300 than I did with digital stuff, when I moved house I started looking at Hispasat (cos that's about all I could get with the way the house faced and had no garden to place a dish outdoors in), but after that things just got a bit dull when the analogue channels were switching off to be replaced with digital, and never really got back into scanning the skies, though I did replace the minidish on the previous house with a 60cm version (though I retained it when we vacated the house), but that was mostly cos of the requirement to reliably pick up BBC Scotland for new year... :)

These days I just hang around here cos I'm just like that... :D
 

timo_w2s

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See Signature
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Maidenhead, UK & Helsinki, Finland
Satellite TV is just a hobby for me which turned useful when our family moved abroad in 1992.

I was always into electronic and radio when I was young, messing about with radios and walkie talkies to try and get them to work better or transmit further than they should... I was also always trying to get out of area ITV stations like TVS so I could get more choice.

I had heard about satellite TV and the possibility of getting TV from other countries but it was probably when I saw a feature on Tomorrows World (my favourite programme back then!) about the launch of Astra 1A and Sky Channel that I really got interested.

In 1989 my grandmother's flat in Finland got a large shared satellite dish and with it three channels where piped via UHF modulators through the existing aerial network; Sky Channel, Eurosport (then run by Sky) and MTV Europe. When staying with my gran over summer it was my first real taste of satellite TV and after that I wanted more. We also watched the change over from Sky Channel to Sky One that summer and the new "We're the One" promotions.

When I got back to the UK I started buying What Satellite regularly (which had just become a full magazine rather than a supplement in What Video) and pleading with the parents to get Sky. Eventually they gave in just to shut me up and rented an analogue Grundig receiver and 75cm dish (rented, as my dad wasn't sure this satellite TV thing would catch on). I thought it was great but was much more interested in the foreign channels and the radio stations and I'd be experimenting with getting the scrambled channels to stabilize their video signals.

As the Grundig receiver had two LNB inputs it was ideal for setting up with another dish (no DiSEqC switches back then!) so I saved up my pocket money and birthday money to get an 80cm dish and LNB so I could scan the skies for other satellites. All done on a budget though, built my own stand for the dish, had to manually turn it to the right satellites and even the LNB needed rotating for the right polarity (and swapping for different bands)... I still remember the first satellite I found was Intelsat at 27.5W and a faint flicker from the Discovery Channel.

When BSB collapsed I managed to buy a bit of cheap kit for next to nothing including a 35cm Channel Master dish which I'm still using today.

From then on there was no stopping me and my kit has grown out of control ever since. ;)
 

timo_w2s

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Maidenhead, UK & Helsinki, Finland
I just remembered I scanned a load of old photos a while back so here's two photos, my gran's shared dish in Finland in 1989 and my own 80cm dish in 1991. By then I'd got another LNB for Telecom band satellites.
 

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Terryl

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My Satellite Setup
OpenBox X5 on a 1 meter motorized dish.
And now a 10 foot "C" band dish.

Custom built PC
My Location
Deep in the Boonies in the central Sierra Nevada mountains of California.
Humm how did I get into satellite ??

Let me think back about a half a century or more to when the Russians launched "Sputnik", learning that they had a transmitter on board and it was sending out beeps as it went over, I patched together a receiver (after blowing several house fuses) from some old army radio gear I found in my Uncles basement and a steerable (by hand) yagi, I listened in on 40.002 MHz as I saw it come over the horizon.

It was easy to spot as it was the only one up there at the time.

Real broadcast satellite came later on in my life when I got my first engineering job at a major broadcast equipment manufacture.
 

Channel Hopper

Suffering fools, so you don't have to.
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A little less analogue, and a lot more crap.
My Location
UK
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Captain Jack

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Interesting thread! I started off with terrestrial TV in Russia. Back in '91, we only had two channels in VHF band (now known as Channel One and Russia 1 on satellite) and with the collapse of the curtain, a number of pirate channels appeared in UHF. Three problems: 1) far from all TVs had a UHF tuner but could relatively easy be upgraded by either fitting it with the extra tuner or buying a frequency extender (shifted UHF frequencies down into VHF band). Our portable black and white had a UHF tuner, while the big colour one did not. So initially, we used two TVs to watch different channels! The now popular NTV Russia channel was one of the first independents to broadcast in UHF. Problem 2) as most were pirate stations (I watched Terminator 2 on one of those channels a few weeks after it was released in the cinemas), the transmission power was low. My mum's place was in a relatively open area and could easily get most channels from the little TV's aerial but my grandparents' place was more obstructed with surroundinh buildings and was a much more difficult job to get a decent signal. 3) pirate TV stations essentially broadcasted VHS playback, which was PAL. The standard in Russia is SECAM. So on an old colour TV, most programming was in black and white! Again, these could be upgraded (usually) to receive PAL transmissions in colour... Fun times. I spent a lot of time with those relatively exotic channels because they weren't easy to get.

Having moved to the UK in '93, we got Sky analogue. Fairly soon, I became homesick and tried to find ways to receive home TV. Back then, the only thing available was something in C band or NTV Plus from 36e, which was as difficult to get as it is now. For a while, it was a pipe dream, so I spent that time turning the 60cm Sky dish manually to 13e and beyond. This was feeding the Amstrad SRD510 receiver. Not bad, those things. Then in '95, we got our very first Philips FilmNet D2MAC decoder to watch the wonderful (at the time) Scandinavian TV channels. I still have the late night offerings on VHS tapes somewhere... After FilmNet left 19.2e, we cancelled the ever increasing Sky sub and moved to 1W. Pirate cards were easily available and we had a good number of channels there. By that time, we bought an inferior Amstrad 650 D/D2MAC receiver as the Philips one was giving us trouble (black band on one side of the picture - you could fix it by entering a service menu but we didn't have a remote to do this).

After that, it was an all digital affair. I bought a used Sky Digital receiver in 2000 to watch FTA stuff from Astra 1 (and, crucially, the newly launched Channel One Russia International channel on Sirius 2) shortly followed by an awful Canal+ Seca receiver from Spain with a card that opened pretty much everything. A few months later, a bought a Humax F1(?) receiver, which I loved. By then I upgraded to a dual feed arrangement for Astra and Hot Bird...followed by the excellent Nokia 9600 receiver with a SCSI interface to 'stream' video directly to my PC. This was now 2002-3, so I moved to a motorised 1m dish, firstly by the Irte dual axis motor and then by a proper DiSEqC Stab motor. Been in this ever since....and still chasing those elusive Russian channels. Though, these days it's more for the 'yay, I can get them' factor rather than actually watching them.
 
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