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  #1  
Old 11-06-2009, 04:55 PM
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Youtube find demonstrating analog satellite tv in the 80s

All credit goes to the producers and the uploader. BTW he has a bunch of other very interesting clips as well.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1muUQtTZC0
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Old 11-06-2009, 07:46 PM
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Yea there was mainly only C-BAND in the 80s.....

BIGGER DISHES but better quality of a signal (Almost no drop outs)
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Old 11-07-2009, 01:12 AM
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Somewhere around here I have a copy of the Cassius Clay/Sonny Liston fight in Miami on Feb. 25, 1964. It is a copy of the fight as received at the Goonhilly Downs receiver in Wales, England. I am not sure how my copy started it's life. 525 was sent to Goonhilly and downconverted there for the Brits. I have no idea where my copy started it's life but is 525.

It starts before the actual broadcast with a slide of the Goonhilly Downs horn...about the size of a house. Then it moves to a 1 minute countdown clock for the local viewing theatres to time their start of the program in their theatre.

The program starts with the American announcers setting the scene with all the noise in the background.

A few minutes in to the program, the signal slowly fades to snow and when it recovers, the audio is only the crowd noise. This looks like a transponder change. This makes sense as the Brits would add their own announcers for the main event.

I am mystifed at this part. Geosyncronous Syncom 2 was in orbit but had low quality video and no audio. Geosyncronous RCA Relay 2 was in orbit and had two transponders but NASA describes one of the transponders as being for PCM telemetry. I'm not sure how it got there but it did!
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Old 11-08-2009, 03:07 PM
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We had a satellite dish by that time. It wasn't as simple as this guy's setup: you powered up a cipher box, tuned in the dish with your rotor control (an LED readout told you what position the dish was at) and then tuned into the station on that particular satellite with a 3rd unit. Fine tuning controls would help get rid of static. You could spend five minutes dialing in your favorite station.

As Dude111 pointed out, the picture was much better, with no pixelation, and we never had any dropouts. We did have freezing rain and ice jam up our dish rotor for a day, though.

When we got Directv, we were very disappointed at the poor picture, which looked flat and pixelated. We also weren't too pleased at the loss of picture during even mild weather.
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Old 11-08-2009, 08:11 PM
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Nothing beat big-dish C-Band or Ku-Band analog transmissions quality wise. I had two big-dish systems at my home from 1989 until I moved a couple of years ago. (the dishes are still there, I still have the property but it's rented out). I recorded a lot of excellent good-quality network feeds and saw a lot of interesting stuff.

I enjoyed manually dialing in each satellite and peaking the dish and receiver for best reception. I always did this before recording some important program.

Today's small-dish digital pictures look pasty and flat compared to the old systems. Not to metion the pixelation problem that was mentioned earlier. I may bring one of the old dishes and set it up here where I live now. I miss those old systems.

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Old 11-08-2009, 11:13 PM
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Hi guys..... Not to sound totally assinine but what analog satprograms are still 'out there'? If I set up a C or Ku satellite and receiverbox what would I get? Very interested in trying this if possible.
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Old 11-09-2009, 08:18 AM
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"Had"? I still use a C-band system and dish daily. Same Winegard Pinnacle 10' dish I put up in 1987. Nowadays though there is almost nothing free or analog. PBS still has a clear analog feed on W4-16, and C-Span has two analog feeds. Everything else I receive now is digital and requires a Motorola 4DTV receiver, and I subscribe through National Programming Service "NPS" one of the only C-band providers left. My days are numbered though, I don't have the digital "side car" unit to get what HD programming there is available and eventually there will be so few C-band subscribers there won't be enough business incentive left to keep it going. Also the cost difference for programming has narrowed since they now insist on bundled programming. In the old days (after General Instrument finally secured the Videocipher from the pirates) programming was mostly ala carte and a hell of a lot cheaper than cable.

Last edited by Ed in Tx; 11-09-2009 at 07:14 PM.
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Old 11-09-2009, 12:43 PM
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Ed, your post reminded me of how much cheaper it was for Satellite service, and how much easier it was to pick and choose the channels you wanted. Another nice bonus was that the major channels offered east and west coast feeds, so you could watch your program at the regular EST time, or tune in three hours later on the west coast time. I remember watching many movies on something like HBO east, liking it, and then tuning into HBO west and recording it three hours after it had begun on east.
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Old 11-09-2009, 12:57 PM
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Yes, was nice. NBC used to have 3 feeds on Ku; East, Mountain and West. And a backup East feed on C-Band. If I happened to see a music act I wanted to record on The Tonight Show or Saturday Night Live, I could wait an hour and tape it on my S-VHS VCR. Excellent audio and video. I have vollumes of stuff like that I recorded direct from satellite for years until the networks scrambled and I had to replace my original Houston Tracker 8 receiver for a GI-Motorola 4DTV unit. The new receiver took the fun out of scanning the satellites as it blue-screens everything with no video which can't be disabled. The old receiver was much easier to use for searching random feeds.
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Old 11-09-2009, 01:48 PM
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I've had three c-band setups over the years. My first was an 8' mesh dish and ChannelMaster receiver, the secoond was another 8' mesh dish and a General Instrument 2500R later replaced with a General Instrument DSR-920 4dtv receiver. the third and my current system is a 10' mesh with a dual C/Ku feedhorn and a Motorola DSR-922 4dtv and the HDD-200 HDTV sidecar. I also have a Scientific Atlanta MPEG-2 DVB receiver that I occasionally hook up and play around with. You're right there isn't much left up there analog in-the-clear but there's a ton of digital up there (both subscription and fta.) What I always hated was the belief that C-Band was dead, which is entirely untrue... it's just that C-Band ANALOG is dead.

Regarding the HDD-200 sidecar. Don't get your hopes up that you'll be seeing more selection with that other than what's already up there. All newly added DCII HD channels use MegaPipe, which the HDD-200 cannot receive. You need a commercial DCII receiver designed for use in cable headends to receive that content. Given that most of the HD on satellite is either DCII or DVB, opt for a DVB receiver instead as that's gonna be your best choice.

I have to give props to NPS, as they've been pretty good to me, and their selection of packages available is pretty comprehensive. Believe it or not, they actually don't bombard me with junkmail and telemarketing calls about switching to DirecTV like some of the other providers had!!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ed in Tx View Post
"Had"? I still use a C-band system and dish daily. Same Winegard Pinnacle 10' dish I put up in 1987. Nowadays though there is almost nothing free or analog. PBS still has a clear analog feed on W5-16, and C-Span has two analog feeds. Everything else I receive now is digital and requires a Motorola 4DTV receiver, and I subscribe through National Programming Service "NPS" one of the only C-band providers left. My days are numbered though, I don't have the digital "side car" unit to get what HD programming there is available and eventually there will be so few C-band subscribers there won't be enough business incentive left to keep it going. Also the cost difference for programming has narrowed since they now insist on bundled programming. In the old days (after General Instrument finally secured the Videocipher from the pirates) programming was mostly ala carte and a hell of a lot cheaper than cable.
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Old 12-21-2009, 02:55 PM
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Still using 2 cband systems and subscribing to everything I can get through NPS. The DCII digital signals are darn near as good as anything you will ever see and they beat the highly compressed KU feeds from Direct and Dish Net.

I have a 10" Weingard mesh here in Milwaukee and a 12" solid fiberglass dish in Presque Isle, Wisconisn just south of the Wisconsin UP boarder. My Milwaukee system has KU also. I used KU with a Free To Air Coship blindsearch receiver, but most of the chanels are foreign language (spanish or Arabic). There are a few feeds that are worth watching on the Coship, but the feeds keep moving around and you have to search them out and relocate them, and I got tired of that whole thing, so I retired the Coship and now I only watch what I subscribe to on the 4DTV Mot 922 receiver. I also have a HDD200 HiDef converter but now we are down to only 2 Starz feeds and a Wealth TV chanel which I do not subscribe to.

Unless SRL (another provider) is able to somehow provide us with an updated receiver that will take advantage of the HD feeds that are provided by the Comcast HITS (Head End In the Sky) I am affraid that DCII cband feeds days are numbered. Unfortunately for some reason NPS has not been able to secure a redistribution contract with HITS. So if we lose some of the DCII master feeds that are being sold by NPS, I may have to start buying from SRL to get the hits feeds on HITS SD. Still better than paying for the over priced and over compressed feeds from Dish and Direct. I get my HD networks over the air locally, but I do miss the HD feeds from the premium feeds like Sho Hbo etc.

Long Live Cband! I will be there till the end.
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  #12  
Old 12-21-2009, 05:33 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ohohyodafarted View Post
Still using 2 cband systems and subscribing to everything I can get through NPS. The DCII digital signals are darn near as good as anything you will ever see and they beat the highly compressed KU feeds from Direct and Dish Net.
Except for the re-uplinked channels on W5 and G3. They are really compressed though. I really wish they would look better.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ohohyodafarted View Post
I also have a HDD200 HiDef converter but now we are down to only 2 Starz feeds and a Wealth TV chanel which I do not subscribe to.
There's also DCII HD from Nebraska ETV that's up there. I've never been able to get the Wealth HD channel, isn't it FTA?


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Long Live Cband! I will be there till the end.
A-Men brother, I'll be there with ya!!!!
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Old 12-21-2009, 10:45 PM
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I've asked this before, but, is there any market for old receivers and equipment? Getting down to the nitty-gritty in closing out the TV shop; they did a lot of big-dish installs back in the day. Lots of used gear, probably some new stuff, seems ashame to just toss it.
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Old 12-22-2009, 05:35 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bgadow View Post
I've asked this before, but, is there any market for old receivers and equipment? Getting down to the nitty-gritty in closing out the TV shop; they did a lot of big-dish installs back in the day. Lots of used gear, probably some new stuff, seems ashame to just toss it.
Skyvision is buying 4dtv receivers. See http://www.skyvision.com/pages/4dtv-buyback.html You should be able to sell LNBs, dish movers, feedhorns, etc. on ebay. If they have any Birdview gear (dishes, hardware, receivers, etc.) that stuff has a big following. There isn't a market for VCII descramblers anymore, as there aren't really any analog scrambled channels still up there and those descramblers are no longer being authorized. Sometimes the higher end analog receivers have a bit of value such as the Chaparral Monterey series and some General Instrument receivers. I collect some of the early receivers such as STS, KLM, Birdview, Luxor, Drake, Chaparral, Channel Master, DX Antenna, and a few other brands.
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Old 12-22-2009, 10:06 PM
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Thanks for the information-I don't know much about that type of gear yet; I'll try ebay with some of the parts. I've seen some feedhorns but I don't know what they are, new/used, what type of dish, etc.

I have a Drake receiver here that is factory reconditioned, in the wrapper. I've tried selling it in several venues but never any bites. Next time I dig it out I'll let you know...it can probably be yours for cost of shipping.
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