Free To Air
Commercial Satellite Television's dirty little secret...
There are lots of satellite signals up there that are not encrypted and can be received with modest equipment. And, there is no charge for the private use of these transmissions.
This state of un-encryption is called Free-To-Air.
Here is a nice
Slashdot discussion of this from April 2005. This covers the several ways to implement the receiver (stand-alone box, computer with TV card, etc...) as well as software applications and links to vendors.
Here are a few vendors that came highly recommended by several people:
Skyvision,
Eye in the Sky and
ROXSAT.
For ex-pats living in the USA, there are a lot of other languages than English available. Basic cost to buy in is under $300 for a stand-alone Ku band system. You can buy a rotator so one dish can look at any number of satellites.
Fascinating stuff -- I knew that there was a lot of activity on the C band (large 6' diameter older dishes) but I didn't know that there was so much on the Ku frequencies...
Posted by DaveH at November 28, 2005 7:11 PM