![20160124_164632[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ieahmDJ.jpg "20160124_164632[1].jpg")
I figured /diy/ might be the best place for this, at least stateside.
Is there anyone here who is into FTA TV? I'm not talking about hack boxes for theft of service, but taking your own dish, aiming it, and receiving unencrypted channels? It seems to be a fairly popular way to get TV internationally, but it's pretty much unknown in the US. Most popular pay-tv channels are encrypted, but there are plenty of 24/7 master feeds, news feeds, and sports feeds available in the US, especially on the weekends for random sports.
So far I have two dishes receiving around 200 channels from four satellites. First is a steel 90cm dish receiving from 91w, 97w, and 103w. 91w has ABC NewsOne and some random feeds, 97w has nearly 200 international/religious channels, 103w has NBC, Cozi, RT, and NHK. The second dish is a 1m fiberglass dish I saved from my old employer, currently aimed to receive a pay channel that's currently unencrypted. I won't mention their name since if they find out, they'll flip the switch.
The LNBF's are all single-output, standard with an LO of 10750MHz. They feed into a 4x1 multiswitch that leads to my kind of crappy Chinese-made receiver, an X2 Premium Mini.
Apologies for the crooked pic above, the thumbnail was rotated properly.
I've looked into it before about a decade ago.
The issue was needing to constantly re-point the dish or buy a motorized one.
So I never pulled the trigger.
OTA, yes....FTA, no
only have a 10ft pole with a medium size antenna and still get all the local channels
fed it into a homeworx converter and I can record as much HD as will fit on an external usb drive
the HDTV signal can be a pain with all the snow, but otherwise it's pretty nice considering the low cost and that it's all portable
>>955742
My dad did this in the early 2000s. He found a dish someone had tossed in his apartment dumpster. He has it set up in his garage and listens to it while he restores his 60s beetle. He said he tried in his apartment but his balcony is blocked by other buildings and trees.
>>955742
FTA died during the 00s due to new encryption methods and everyone generally locking down but I had heard that recent fiddling with cloud computing has allowed for the practice to open back up again.
>>955959
That's why I said actual FTA, not theft-of-service. I give zero shits about most pay channels, except for HBO which has a legal streaming service. I'm not going to get an IKS-capable hack box just so I can watch a marathon of Extreme Cupcake Model Wars: SVU reruns.
>>955789
That's my main annoyance. If I wasn't so limited in funds I'd have a motor and a better receiver, or at least a few more dishes. I think you can theoretically connect up to 64 lnb's if you have the space for all the dishes.
>>955743
>was rotated properly.
What you do is strip the exif then rotate then upload.
Have played with some fta. Watch feeds at work. Its interesting to see some of the stuff before its edited into news.
>>956040
True enough, but I should have clarified that the encryption was for previously clear raw feeds for most of the major networks/news services. As you've said, the majority of FTA has dwindled to religious programming and some straggler International feeds.
>>955742
whats your C/N on SES3 I have a 2.3 C/N on a 4.5M dish which should be 10+, I think its interference but hard to tell
Used to watch (C-band?) back when huge dishes were a thing. Didn't know it was a thing these days, but it sounds like an excuse to be a dish hobbyist rather than something a poor TV fan can get into.
Related: DIY Wifi Mesh
http://imgur.com/a/lOmNF
