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

[wod]

Compared with you guys I've missed out on quite a bit.

Only started playing around with dishes after on digital went bust after using a broken seca encryption and then got sky.

Not sure how many years ago that was but then ended up getting a receiver and art card for the footy on 13e and have played around with cams and cards.

Still got an Elvis programmer in my bits n pieces that was a good one back in the day.

I've only just recently got interested in it again after being bored of it all for last year or so.

A lot of the old channels I remember via seeing them at parents/relatives houses.

Even the channel idents were better then we have today and sky should have kept.

The old analogue boxes with them frequency expanders I do remember and the static n please wait message when changing channels.

I thought bsb had the better picture quality though weren't they rgb and wide screen compatible. The squarial dishes were much better looking.

How come bsb used 33west for the uk than 19.2e at the time?

 

[archive10]

Being a software engineer by education and training, I have managed teams building STB software and especially back-ends for "interactive television" since the late 90's. Software stacks, serv-lets, meta-data models, that sort of thing. Mostly cable-stuff.

Got a Sky subscription when I moved to the UK in 2003.
I believe I had a zone 1 dish fitted to my house - not sure; it just worked.
Was fairly content until I moved to DK in 2009.
Missed "Have I got News for You", "QI" etc. a bit.

Realised I needed a 180cm dish for Astra 2D, and bought the cheapest I could find easily: A Jonsa 6-petal dish from Maplin (f/D 0.36). And with a "matching" Invacom 0.6 f/D universal LNB. (Bastards.) This was really the start of fiddling with hardware and tools, meters etc.

Jonsa dish ended up in the skip, acquired a Channel Master 180 + Black Ultra LNB instead. Full gratification attained.
Almost never look back (unless shaking my head, slapping my thighs, and laughing quite hard at the same time).

Got local Danish Viasat subscription, and mounted the provided sh*t dish (Telesystems ovaloid P57, which is really 2/3's of a full dish). Replaced this with a WaveFrontier T55, which is MUCH better. (But WAY harder to set up!)

Intrigued by the performance and actual physical 'feel' of the CM180, I got another one, and then started acquiring CMxxx dishes from the local market. And others like Prodelin, Visiosat etc. Have a few now, from 100-180, in various states of wear...

Have acquired a range of STBs while traveling in Europe; they're used to watch French, Italian, Spanish tv etc occasionally.

Hate to admit, but I probably will need to wind down now upon request of SWMBO, as the dishes are filling up valuable (?) garden space, and are generally pointed all in the same direction (28.2E) for comparison reasons. (Excluding the motorised ones, of course).

 

[william-1]

I started when digital tv started after watching sky analogue for 2 years via 19.2 east changed over to sky digital then started to experiment with alternative digital receivers on the old 19.2 east dish then discovered that if I moved the dish manually & marked the sat position on the pole I could get 16 east,13 east,10 east ect moved up to a 80cm motorised dish 42 east to 8 west with trees past 8 west
After trying about 20 SD receivers (Strong,Humax,Manhattan,Technomate,Echostar, Eurosport fta @ 8 west was a good find that lasted a few years,
Next came Blind Scan the TM1000D+ Super was excellent for feeds followed by Manhattan & Echolink,more recently the SpiderboxHD9000 & TM5502HD have proved to be the best blind scan receivers now the transmissions have become more complex with 16 & 32 APSK now we have Multi-Stream
The game changer will be next year with H265 & a new batch of Satellite receivers hopefully covering 4:2:2 as my AZBox seems to clear less these days due to the use of Codecs

 

[A nonymous]

How did i get into this. I was given an old BSB squarial and a BSB receiver after the demise of BSB @31w. By changing the the plate round inside squarial i managed to get some of the channels off the French TDF satellite and German TVSat sattelites @ 19w using the same equipment.

This went on to playing with D2Mac stuff at 5e and 1w and Analogue channels at 19.2e until about 2002 when personal circumstances didn't leave much time to play with Sat Stuff.

In 2004 i was given an old Sky Digibox so i started to play agian on 19.2e and 28e. This got very boring very quickly due to the Digibox being used. In 2005 i purchased a FortecStar Gamma receiver, and an 80cm dish and setup for 13e and 19.2e and a minidish at 28e.

I then purchased a Patched Technomate TMS 1500 CI+ which at the time gave me access to the French TPS & Multivision channels and also the Spanish Digital+ and German Premier Channels all on 19.2e. This got me hooked so up went the 1m motorised setup, giving me Digi TV at 1w and TVCabo at 30w. This is when i purchased my Digitalb card and my first genuine Dreambox.

At that point i found a job advertised for trainee Satellite and Aerial engineers. I applied and got the job. It didn't take me long to get the hang of it and after 7 months i left the company who trained me to work for a competitor looking after the TV systems for the local council. As with most things i got bored after about 12 months and went back to the company that trained me to install new TV Systems for another Council. The biggest system i installed was in 2010 serving 188 properties from one aerial and one dish. As far as i know its still up and running.

I stayed with that company for about 3 years and then went self employed if anything to get away from the complete silly of a boss i had at the time, you know the sort, the ones who take all the credit when things go well but are the first to criticise when something becomes difficult or when they get their arses kicked from above. Being self employed went well until Digital switch over happened and the bottom fell out of the market completely. At that point i went back to driving HGVs as there was more money in it and i now just do TV stuff as a hobby and when friends need help.

I still keep up to date with new things as one day i may well get back into it as a career although probably not in the UK. Since 2011 i have passed a CAI (Confederation of Aerial Industries) IRS Networks course, a C & G Fibre Optics course, and i also got qualified to install Communications cabling in Canada. I also intend to get qualified to install Satellite Broadband within the next few months.

I have had far too much equipment to list it all including about 20 different dishes and well over 60 receivers within the last 10 years.

 

[hairybadger]

I got into it by accident about two years ago. I was talking to another Brit who lives locally, and she was saying that it was possible to receive UK TV with a suitably-sized dish. We'd had some work done on the house and the Canalsat dish needed resiting anyway. I did some research and found that I could cover both 28.2E and 19.2E with the same dish, and so stumbled upon the T90. I ordered a Freesat receiver from Amazon UK (Dixons or whatever in Didcot would not sell one to me, presumably because I was trying to use a French bank card to purchase TV equipment) and didn't have too much trouble wiring it all up. The problem with the T90 is that has too much potential, so over the following months I added more and more LNBs to it. The *God awful* Canalsat receiver doesn't do Diseqc, and the Foxsat I had only does Diseqc 1.0 so I swapped in an Openbox S10 and set up cascading Diseqc with a few 1.0 boxes and a 1.1 (10-way, although I could only get the cascading to work on the front 8). Before I knew it I had the T-90 maxed-out, even with an extension bar hanging off the end so I could get 5W. Next I started playing with the old 60cm dish and a motor, quickly replacing it with an 80cm sourced from the neighbour, and this in turn was replaced on the sly with an identically-painted 1m Gibi

Anyone still awake?

 

[Lazarus]

Anyone still awake?

Whatever happened to your friendly couleuvre?

 

[hairybadger]

Whatever happened to your friendly couleuvre?

We only saw it the once, which is just as well because if we had seen it again my wife would probably want us to move out. That being said - if we did that I could pull the same underhand dish-changing trick again and move to a 1.2

 

[jeallen01]

OK, well here we go with the “new” thread about how I/we got into the “satellite scene”.

For my part, it started in the late 1980’s when I lived in Bristol for a few years and, through a social group, I went to a party in Clifton (one of the “upmarket” areas of the city!) where the host had a C-band dish mounted on the roof a block of flats, and I thought “that looks interesting”.

After that I started buying a few relevant mags, and notably “What Satellite” (or “WotSat” to most of us here – RIP!), and carried on when I came back to London in 1989, but had no time to do anything about getting a system until mid-1991 when I got 2 weeks extra holiday “in lieu” of all the overtime I had just been working. Having been reading WotSat and other mags for some time I had decided that I wanted to “dive straight in” by buying a steerable system, and especially an NEC 5000 system with an 80cm dish on an H-H mount. Looking through the mag ads, I found a Turkish-run shop in North London that advertised that system, went there and demo’d it, and bought it on the condition that it would include the dish and mount right outside the front door because I could see that the latter were already pretty well set up and aligned, and so all that I should have to do would be to get it firmly mounted on a very flat surface and pointed in the right direction. I then mounted it on the flat roof of the front bedroom bay window, cabled it to the lounge and – with quite a bit of effort – actually did get it pointed pretty much in the right direction! J

That was followed by various accessories to expand the system including Filmnet decoders and so on, and then, in the mid-1990s, I piggy-backed another LNB on the existing one and added an Sky analogue receiver, followed later in 1998 by one of the very first Amstrad Sky digital receivers.

A few years later I took the NEC dish & mount off the roof of the bay window because the bolts were causing that to leak, put it into temporary retirement, and put up the Raven Gemini 90 on a ground mount in the rear garden. I fitted 3 or 4 LNBs to that and managed to get around 5W to 28E! Later-on still (around 2000-2002) I put a scaffolding pole (where it is still in use for the TD110) near the other end of the garden and put the NEC dish and H-H mount back up on that. By this time the analogue-only NEC Rx was getting very out of date, and so I bought a TM 3000 DAPCI analogue and digital RX , and connected that up to the NEC motor (using dropper resistors in the motor cct because the Rx was a 36V drive whereas the NEC motor was 24V) – and then did nothing much else to the system, or even use it that much, until I retired 3yrs ago and had time to get back to this scene.

First job was to put up some fixed dishes that had also come from either the local recycling centre or other “s/h” sources over the previous years, and I tried to drive those via DiSEqC from the TM, but that was not practicable and so I bought an Icecrypt 33250 CCIHD, but that had problems sending the correct commands to the switches on the dishes, and it finally went back to Icecrypt UK – luckily before they went bust! Then, with a lot of help from people on this forum, I got a TM5402 M3 and a Vu+ Solo 2 (on reflection, the latter was NOT the best choice for a totally newbie to both the digital age and Enigma receivers!).

At the same time I updated the steerable dish and motor system with a s/h TD88 on a Supreme Dark Motor but that did not want to "play" with the Solo2 – only to be told by the supplier that Supreme motors did not “get on” with the commands from some Enigma 2 receivers, and so it was swopped for the Superior version, which does work with them.

In the meantime I did a lot of cabling/re-cabling to the house, and in particular to the upstairs bedroom which we now call the “office”, and then supplemented the later TM & VU+ Rx’s with several other receivers “and so on”.

That’s “sort of” where I am now – so how about you?

 

[Lazarus]

Formerly, I was part of the Design Team for a Marine Satellite Comms. system, way back in the mid 1970s, and I found many of the associated concepts fascinating: Gyro-stabilisation, Tracking, ultra-low noise (for that time) semiconductors allowing the infinitesimal signal strengths to be utilised ... etc. etc.

Latterly, Hobson's Choice having moved to a house with no DTT coverage, marginal (ie snowy!) Analogue TV and a true Yorkshire disinclination to go the "Sky" route. Instead, bought a Fortec Star Rx for 28E FTA, realised there was other stuff out there, so installed an old "Analogue" dish, found in a neighbour's garage, with a 13/19E LNB and soon after installed an 80cm Motorised.

 

[Captain Jack]

I already wrote about this in this thread - https://www.satellites.co.uk/forums/threads/how-did-i-get-into-this.163264/post-904937

Maybe merge the two?

 

[jeallen01]

@CJ

So THIS is at least the 3rd thread on the subject (there being the one to which I contributed in 2016, but which cannot be found now)!

I was asked to start this one but I would be more than happy for it to be merged with the one to which you just linked - in fact, I think that would be a very good idea. Also, if the "missing" thread is located later, then that could also merged into the same one and then we would have a reasonably complete "picture" of people's stories as posted since, at least, 2014.

 

[Lazarus]

Just goes to show the best Search Facility is the jogging of people's memories

 

[RustySpoons]

I saw something on Tomorrows World, was fascinated by it.
Had a bit of a fascination when I was younger looking up at buildings with satellite dishes on them, nearly all were prime focus back then, always wondered what they were receiving as this was before the launch of Astra etc.

Ended up getting my hands on a Salora satellite receiver and a oval shaped dish with a box of LNB's, this had been in use for a year previously so I got it cheap off a friend, I think it was his grandfathers or something. This even had a control for Sparklies on the remote, annoying little buggers to eliminate back then!

The LNB's were all faulty, they had a magnetic polariser which the coils were reading infinity, I painstakingly took them apart and repaired the windings, I think they were ITT, Nokia and NEC.

I had the dish bolted out the back of the house but left the brackets loose, I could lean out the window and move the dish by hand.
Then Sky started encrypting everything so got hold of a Videocrypt decoder, would often be given subscription cards that had a month or so left on them as at that time when a card was updated the old one would still work for a bit.

Dad had a receiver installed downstairs, that was a Ferguson with an integrated Videocrypt decoder, with a black mesh dish and a blue cap Marconi LNB, I ended up having this later on.

While I was still messing around with mine I acquired a few more receivers to mess around with. A AB Wolesely Starlet, some Alba wedge shaped thing, some I can't remember and then ended up with the Ferguson from downstairs.

I picked up a Squarial but did not have a DMAC capable receiver so stripped the squarial apart to see how it worked, was an incredible bit of engineering.

Joined a few dodgy websites which I won't mention and messed around with cables and interfaces that plug in to the receiver and PC.

Then ended up having CATV installed in the street so umm messed around with that, that eventually went digital and I bought a Fujitsu Siemens DVB-C card (Was HUGE) and ran VDR on linux and used that for many years.

Got back in to Satellite but DVB-S, had far too many boxes to mention,
Some of which were:

Dreambox DM800 (Did lots and lots of modifications to the tuner on this)
Comag SL65
VU+ Solo2
Venton Unibox HD2
Lots of other random DVB-S boxes that I can't remember.

 

[Lazarus]

Mod.Note

Revived Topic merged with an earlier incarnation.

Carry on!

 

[jeallen01]

.. so I swapped in an Openbox S10 and set up cascading Diseqc with a few 1.0 boxes and a 1.1 (10-way, although I could only get the cascading to work on the front 8). ..?

Those "10 way" switches apparently could be made to use all 10 inlets - but only if you could get a special programmer, which you only get hold of if you bought something like a 1000 or 10,000 as a bulk purchase from China

 

[william-1]

My interest started a bit earlier with analogue TV,
I mounted a 8 Element VHF band II on a North to South axis on a chimney stack & in the summer I was able to receive about 12 ITV regions on my KB 20" B&W TV from Grampian in the Scotland to Southern & Westward TV this was on the Norfolk coast in a village called Kelling,

This TV also had UHF so I was able to watched BBC2 Spike Milligan show Q5,
When my grandfather died in 1969 I moved to Vange in Essex to stay with my gran & got a job maintaining machines that made electrical resistors,
In the evenings I was able to watch the 1st test transmissions of ITV London in UHF with Double your money with H Green,

Back to today I have now moved into Linux satellite with the SX88 HD & the A4K UHD receivers these are far more user friendly than my earlier Linux receivers,
I still like the TM6902HD & TM5302HD for finding out was is out there but I am gradually moving over to the Octagon SX88 & Amiko A4K there is still no 4:2:2 receiver out there & unlikely to be so my next step will be a TBS6903 Professional DVB-S2 Dual Tuner PCIe Card in my spare PC with a 120cm Gibertini as most of the feed transmissions are borderline now with the old 100cm.

 

[4wd]

Yes, Tutti Frutti was the reason to buy equipment lol

1980's something, was fascinated with the ongoing electronic advancements and wanted to receive miracles from the sky. Got a motorized system. Seeing the very first pictures on the tv was like a gift and blessing from the gods of electronics (even if it was some german politicians discussing something I did not understand at all :O) Later, it was all about Filmnet, Viasat and Sky.

Still got that 1st dish, motorized 90, currently doing astra 19 here in France. Some story here The old motor-90

 

[TJExcalibur]

I started as a kid in the fifties, poor as hell but used to find anything mechanical or electrical and take it apart, it often stayed apart. I think I still have the first Philips CD player in bits in the roof space. I once propped an old radio speaker on the window sill outside of my little box room bedroom. Realised when wired up to a 9v battery it would clunk so I made it clunk non stop. Did a circuit across the pendulum in an old clock, every swing it would "clunk", could hear it down the bottom of the road. Left it going for ages until the Frenchman across the road told my mother he would strangle me if he could. Now I love to tinker but had my first sat set up as a 50th present in 1992. Kept calling them back and they said I had altered the settings, well maybe but as often no signal and discovered the cowboys had run the cable across the carpet gripper rod.

 

[s-band]

I started with terrestrial DXTV. NED1 & 2, BRT & TDF were regularly receivable in the SE. Soviet TV was there quite often in summer via sporadic E on band 1. I followed Steve Birkhill's exploits but never got anything from ATS-6 or quite finished a C band LNA for Ghorizont. The attraction was to get something that wasn't mainstream.

In 1988ish I bought the 1.5m IRTE, which I still use, and an Echostar 4500 from Micro-X and a year later a 3m Winegard from Alston-Barry for C band. In those days I actually watched some programming like: MTV (it used to be watchable!), CMT, CNN and trans-Atlantic feeds on 27.5W, TV Norge (inc. Roger Waters The Wall from Berlin) etc on 1W, Sat 1, Filmnet etc on 13E and feeds of the fall of the Soviet empire etc. C band had exotic stuff, unseen in UK, like NTA Ch 10 Lagos and Doordarshan. Seeing something from Africa emerge from the sparklies was magic. Memories still linger on Youtube e.g.

and this, which you could get on a dustbin lid on C band,

Other weird early stuff included Saudi 2 & Egypt Satellite Channel on S band, PBS radio on L band Inmarsat, SCPC radio on Hispasat 45W and DSR (16 uncompressed digital radio channels on TV-Sat & DSF Kopernicus).

After a lapse, when analogue tailed off, I used a DM7000 in early 2000s. Once the interesting stuff was lost I gave up until returning a couple of years ago using a TBS card. Sad?

 

[sonnetpete]

Now that I've been on my own for over 5 years, my present set up goes way beyond what would have been sanctioned

Thought it might be nice to update my own story. I met my present SWMBO online (no she isn't Russian) almost three years ago and she's very supportive of the hobby, though despairs of the clutter that goes with it. I think she was secretly pleased when I mothballed the Laminas last winter. I don't devote as much time to sats as I'd like nowadays, travelling, eating out and writing about those things in my blog takes up a lot of my days. However, I do want to ground mount the Laminas and possibly upgrade to a 4K receiver which may happen later this year...