http://www.tvtechnology.com/features/news/n_Sun_Sets_on_C_band.shtml
Sun Sets on C-band
'BigUglyDish' disappears from backyards
by John Merli
WASHINGTON: It reached its peak less than 25 years ago, but it seems
more like light years since the era of huge backyard C-band satellite
dishes captured hundreds of channels of free television for several
million people in a span of only a few years that today is the stuff of
communications folklore.
Those big fat dishes were hard to miss. Behemoth C-band disks measuring
up to three meters wide, rising out of rural backyards (and often hidden
in ingenuous places in the big city), pointed toward clusters of distant
satellite signals in space.
Today, their numbers are dwindling rapidly in the digital age, yet it's
not uncommon to spot the perhaps 200,000 C-band receivers that
remain--the mostly weather-worn TVRO1 and TVRO2 dishes (TV
receive-only)--especially while driving through the back roads of rural
America.
Historically, the widespread emergence of the iconic backyard dish in
the 1970s and early '80s represented some of the same resourcefulness
and independence reminiscent of the 19th century Wild West, when a
relative handful of tech-savvy consumer pioneers decided to stake their
claim for capturing television signals from space, for free, whether the
powers-that-be in Washington liked it or not.
For veteran broadcast engineer, consultant and industry historian Mark
Schubin, involvement in commercial satellite projects began in 1973. For
the past 30 years, he's also been media consultant for New York's
Lincoln Center.
"Back when TV was typically transmitted by satellite only to
100-foot-diameter dishes, Westinghouse had 3-meter earth stations for
the high-power NASA Applications Technology Satellite-6. I borrowed one
from Westinghouse, and ATS-6 from NASA, for an exhibition I put together
in January 1975 called 'The Performing Arts and the Future of Television.'
"The idea was to set up an earth station on Lincoln Center Plaza and
pick up images of the Colorado Concert Ballet performing live in Denver.
A regisseur [dance master] in New York would critique the dancers and
his comments would be sent back to them. We set up the earth station and
got nothing," Schubin said.
"We checked the pointing with NASA and still got nothing. The NASA
person asked if I'd used a compass or an architect's benchmark. I said
I'd used the compass. He did a quick calculation of magnetic deviation
and then said, 'Give it a good swift kick to the left.' I did, and the
pictures locked right in!"
The Communications Act of 1934 stipulated that no one could receive
transmissions, other than broadcast or amateur, without the express
permission of the senders. Anyone with an earth station who didn't have
such permission was committing an illegal act. When a third program
source, Trinity Broadcasting, went to satellite and gave blanket
permission to all dish owners, the physical possession of an earth
station suddenly was not automatically suspect.
C-band had been designated the first commercial (nonmilitary) frequency
band set aside for general satellite use in the United States. But
C-band was shared with terrestrial microwave services, so there were
limits on how much power satellites could transmit so they wouldn't
interfere with microwave towers.
"This satellite power issue had limited the degree to which smaller
dishes could be used at C-band, as opposed to Ku-band, which is not
shared with the terrestrial microwave service," according to satellite
engineer Sidney Skjei of Skjei Telecom in Falls Church, Va. "This is one
reason the typical backyard C-band dish is so much larger than the
Ku-band dishes now used by DirecTV and EchoStar."
WTCG in Atlanta, destined to become a national "Superstation," went up
on satellite in 1976, and PBS began broadcasting over C-band two years
later. And while NBC, ABC and CBS came to C-band in 1981-83, the birth
of the C-band backyard dish movement began a few years earlier in
October 1979. In response to hundreds of formal requests from the public
that C-band dishes be allowed to operate without licenses, the FCC, in
its collective wisdom, agreed.
And then C-band really took off, according to Bob Cooper, the legendary
C-band proponent who is given much of the credit for tapping the
imagination of millions of America's would-be techno-pioneers. Cooper
(widely known as "Coop" in C-band folklore) had taken full advantage of
national media attention from such venues as the "CBS Evening News" and
TV Guide (where he wrote firsthand about his own backyard dish).
Cooper was soon besieged with thousands of inquiries. As a way to get
the word out, he began publishing C-band news, dish owners' comments,
research and other aspects of the growing revolution. Proud C-band dish
owners began lovingly referring to their dish as BUD (BigUglyDish).
"Prior to the FCC's approval, a complicated, time-consuming and
expensive licensing procedure was required for a 'legal' dish," Cooper
said. "Now we had the real possibility of privately owned, inexpensive
C-band dishes. Already in '79 there were thousands of unlicensed
terminals. But with licensing gone, it became a wide-open market
allowing 'respectable' firms such as Channel Master, Panasonic, Uniden,
Drake, and even Sony, to create hardware for C-band. By '85, you could
set up a dish for as little as a thousand bucks."
TUNING IN THE WORLD
Cooper said the years 1979-86 were the best of times for C-band dish
owners (although he knew time was running out). While the majority of
typical terrestrial-only viewers could count the total number of channel
choices on one hand, these newly legal C-band dish owners were now
tuning into the world far beyond their local markets, and for free.
Skjei said C-banders could tune into HBO, Showtime, and The Movie
Channel, as well as WTCG, WOR and WGN.
"But there were also basic network feeds, too, along with PBS, and a PPV
channel called 'People's Choice,'" Skjei said. (PBS still provides its
Schedule X feed for C-band dish owners.)
"For a while, even most national cable channels were distributed in the
clear--with no scrambling--fed directly to cable headends and to
backyard C-band dish owners," Skjei said.
When some scrambling finally did begin, it led to some newsworthy
mischief by that era's equivalent of today's computer hackers.
Several years before the FCC gave its blessing to C-band dish owners,
Schubin remembers addressing the NCTA Executive Committee in Arizona: "I
told them satellite signals were not secure and that the FM 'capture
effect' could allow someone to knock a programmer off the air.
"Ralph Baruch of Viacom asked me if I was saying that HBO could knock
Showtime off the air and said he'd take his chances with that, getting a
big laugh. Sometime thereafter, the self-styled 'Captain Midnight'
knocked HBO off the air doing exactly what I'd said."
Schubin said what had angered Captain Midnight was HBO's decision to
scramble its signals, thus leaving C-band dish owners in the dark.
"The programming was FTA [free-to-air] only because an economical,
dependable scrambling system had not yet evolved," Cooper said. "This
FTA situation continued for seven great years, through early 1986,
allowing aggressive sellers to roll out more than 3 million home
terminals at numbers approaching 75,000 monthly.
"Yet it was a house of cards doomed to fail, and with each passing month
prior to scrambling's launch, the cable industry became increasingly
paranoid as they found themselves disconnecting thousands of homes each
week from their cable lines because folks were buying their own home
dish systems," said Cooper, who lives in New Zealand where he continues
to publish his magazine, "SatFACTS Monthly."
While NBC uses the Ku-band to distribute its programming to affiliates,
the remaining commercial networks still use C-band to transmit their
programming to hundreds of affiliate analog dishes already in place.
Economically, however, digital content is less expensive to transmit via
satellite. A transponder typically accommodates one or two analog TV
signals, while the same transponder could accommodate more than 10
digital signals.
The backyard C-band BUD owner lives on, but his days are numbered along
with his program options. The latest example was this summer's
announcement from Starz Entertainment Group, which said simply, "We are
grateful to the C-band customers who made it possible for the satellite
industry to launch 20 years ago. But digital technology is clearly the
wave of the future."
On Dec. 31, Starz will end its analog transmissions to all its C-band
consumers.
--
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