Free-to-Air Satellite Done Dirt Cheap
By Trip Ericson on Sunday, February 20 2011, 13:25 - Opinion - Permalink
I've long been interested in free-to-air satellite, and became especially interested after having spent several semesters with the UVA Radio Club's Equipment Manager who was very into it. As a result, I got to see it in action and began seriously thinking about getting into it personally.
When I was at Frostfest two weekends ago, I spotted a Coolsat 6000 Premium for sale. $40 later, I owned this box and took it home with me. I immediately went on Freecycle and posted a "Wanted" ad for a HughesNet satellite dish. I got a single response, and last Sunday, I met up with this gentleman and for $25, he gave me two old dishes, a wall-mount, one new-looking dish with arm, and an LNB.
I immediately tried to put everything together, and soon realized that I completely misunderstood; the LNB was for DirecTV and thus circularly polarized rather than linear. So after realizing it, I went on eBay and for $10 got a cheap linear LNB. It arrived yesterday and I managed to attach it to the dish, and within an hour of fighting with it, I had what I wanted.
After having significant trouble with the Al Jazeera live stream, I decided that I wanted to try to get Al Jazeera by satellite, since the satellite feed wouldn't get overloaded and start skipping the way the web stream had been. I scanned my box up at the radio club so as to have it already scanned in for ease of dish aiming, and then it didn't take me too long to get it going.
Here's what the whole setup looks like.
I don't currently have a way to get it in the door, though next weekend at Winterfest I hope to pick up some flat coax for that purpose. Here's a better look at the dish setup itself.
This is really a demonstration of how not to set up a dish:
The pole is neither plumb nor secured to the deck,
The LNB is being held on with rope and a shim made of a folded piece of paper,
And I aimed it by hand without use of a compass or anything.
But, the end result is usable and the setup is only for the next three months, so I think I'll be okay. =)
I definitely am missing a significant amount of the content available on Galaxy 19 due to my poor setup, but all I really care about is Al Jazeera and Russia Today which are both on the same transponder and come in perfectly, so I'm pretty happy with it. Down the line, once I am working and moved to wherever I need to be, I plan to do a more proper and permanent setup.
Comments
I'm so impressed about the way you've done it. I own same receiver but unfortunately I'm w/o satellite knowledge to make it useful, maybe one day. thanks for your post.
Steve:
There's not really too much knowledge required. If you have the receiver, then all you need is a dish with a linear LNBF (DirecTV and Dish Network use an incompatible circular LNBF) and the general ability to aim it--and there are websites like http://www.dishpointer.com that will help you aim it.
If there's anything up there that you might want to watch, it's definitely worth a couple of hours to do it. I'm so glad that I can now watch Al Jazeera without relying on the web stream.
"Down the line, once I am working and moved to wherever I need to be, I plan to do a more proper and permanent setup."
Do like I did--get hold of a five-or ten-gallon bucket, some concrete mix and a length of steel fence post. You mix up the concrete in the bucket, set the post in it and let the concrete set up. Once it's properly set, you can then attach the dish to the post. Certainly heavy enough to be semi-permanent, yet you can still relocate it if you need to.
darth_vader:
I will probably do that at some point down the line, but I don't want to have to try to transport that home from here when I graduate in three months. My current setup is actually working at the moment, and I'm watching Al Jazeera as I type this. When it warms up a bit, I plan to go outside and fine tune it some more, as the signal is just barely above decoding and is pixelating now and then, but without audio loss.
Looks pretty good, Trip. I want to do a FTA setup myself but I will probably go the "proper and permanent" route including a motorized dish. But hey, if it works it works. Nothing wrong with that!
Trip -- excellent work. If you get a chance, pick up a Spitfire Elite LNB for around $15. It is an excellent LNB to use and should boost quality on even the weakest TPs for you on your set-up.
Ryan: Thanks! When you put yours together, make sure to send me some pictures. =)
Zach: Thanks for the tip. I'm thinking about doing a separate setup back at home (this is my setup at school) and so I'll need a second LNBF for that. Actually, I'd probably put this one at home and keep the new one with me here since the one at home would actually be set up correctly. =)
I purchased all the FTA equipment from ebay for around $200. It took me a couple days to figure out how to get a signal. I didn't have the settings on the tuner set properly, so everytime I tried to aim the dish, it wouldn't work. The LNB has a light that turns green when it's pointed properly, but I didn't have the tuner settings right in order for the light to function properly.
Great job with the simple effective setup. I'm currently trying to convince my mom to let me get an old BUD off my friend and put it in the back yard since they are easier to find(and contain many more decent channels).