Free To Air Basics: Reading a copy of Make Magazine, an individual was picking up "Free To Air" (FTA) satellite programming for under $50. All it took was an old Primestar dish or equivelant, a "FTA" receiver and a bit of aiming.
Well, I couldn't pass up the "free" and "under $50", especially since I happened to have a Primestar dish in the back yard! Reading closer, I'd have to find a used receiver that happened to be able to receive FTA transmissions to keep it within the $50 pricerange.
After some searching with Google, I found one that was $100 - twice as much as I could spend if I were patient, but still around three months of Dish Network programming.
While I was waiting for the receiver, I happened to find a "Dish 500" dish - not the one they were talking about in Make, but to my naive self, it was worth free. The next week someone pitched an old DishNetwork receiver with a card. Hmmm. Worth getting my feet wet while waiting, right?
Additional Equipment
False Starts
More Tools
Some things need to be close to the Receiver
Aiming the Dish, got 95W!
Aiming for 97W, got Wild Feed
Aiming the third time (the second time I got 101), I had the compass, the signal meter and the drizzle on my head. I aimed it to 213 degrees azimuth, and began adjusting up and down = got a strong signal. After scanning for programming, I found I didn't have IntelSat 5, but was able to pull in a wild feed from "Cheesesteak 1" - a satellite truck according to "Al7Bar.tk". Mostly feeds of operations, I'm not sure where it was actually transmitting from.
|
Ads by MeCommerce:
|
