A guy I worked with up until about a year or two ago has one of those mega-honking dishes. His big complaint was trying to find a good UPS unit for it, since every time the power flickered and the UPS faltered, the dish had to scan the entire equator and they were down for 15-20 minutes. If I didn't live in a condo complex, I might dig something like that... Picking up HD Nasa TV and all sorts of bizarro things. The modern boxes have decoder cards so you can get pay-for things like HBO and stuff.
But yeah you have to "plan" to watch TV. Probably part of that scanning sequence to build a guide. You cant channel surf with your channel up/down when it might take a minute to pick up another transponder. ________________________________ From: David [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2010 10:45 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Possible false-positive for Vipre I bought a house in about 1994 that had one of those huge military grade parabolic dishes. Could pick up quite a few things, including a lot of the network feeds before they made it to the news, and some foreign broadcasts. No encryption at all, but it was difficult to 'plan' to watch anything in particular. On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Ben Scott <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 7:19 PM, Micheal Espinola Jr <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > Yep, it was a point-to-point service (or something like that). You got a > special directional antenna attached to your roof. Are you sure you're not thinking of old-fashioned satellite TV? Not the modern mini-dish stuff; I'm talking about the giant C-band dishes. They're used by TV networks to distribute their programming from central studios to local broadcast points and cable head-ends. The occasional home AV snob would have a receiver. The programming was all transmitted in the clear so there was nothing stopping people other than the (usually significant) expense of the equipment. > Can anyone correct me if I am wrong? The always-reliable Wikipedia </irony> says that HBO began as one of the first pay TV services using underground cable in Manhattan, and Manhattan only. It later added satellite distribution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBO -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ -- David _____________________ "A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy." --Samuel Adams ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
