I had a C-Band dish in Alaska, when it got too cold out the motor would stop working and one person would have to go out and manually turn the dish while there was a person in the middle shouting out the signal strength lol.

my father had one 3 meter dish in germany in 90s, mounted 15 meter high (3 story building with long antenna mast on it) over a small hill. watched english simpsons before any localization existed. was THE motivation to learn english. it was movable, and could recive from geostationary satellites near the horizon. early descrambling was easy.

I can't believe the VIDEO failed to mention that users could tune in to channels from all over the world. Kudos to all the commenters sharing stories of people they knew who used their giant satellite dishes to tune in to channels from other countries!

I remember back in the 80's, at the state fair, dish sellers had a setup to demonstrate what the dishes could do. This was back in the day when the ABC Evening News was broadcast from New York, Washington and Chicago. It was pretty cool watching the broadcast and being able to see and hear the anchors and producers talking back and forth to each other during what would have been a commercial break for everybody else watching regular broadcast TV.

I used to sell and install the big dishes back in the '80s. It was amazing how many channels you could get, back then it was common for cable TV to only supply 12 ~ 30 channels. I remember watching the Daytona 500 feed from Daytona to the network, during the commercial times the announcers would chat amongst themselves thinking they weren't on the air.

If you were an early enough adopter to satellite you could bypass the scramblers. When I was in high school my friend's dad was a journalist for the big tech magazines. They were able to tap raw signals and watch broadcasters pick their noses before they went on air, which was a favorite story of their family. They had access to every channel being broadcast, and he would watch shows that were totally unheard of in our region.

My dad bought a big motorised satellite dish in the 90s, and sourced a decoder card with a telephone line so that it could update itself. Had +1000 channels growing up 😂 It was kinda awesome hearing that dish move around when you went from one satellite to the next.

After getting married in 1993, and having cable for 6 months, we purchased the large dish. My equipment had the ability to handle all the sat's, you could manually adjust tracking, and it would even turn the dish and turn on your VCR to record the shows. I absolutely loved the big dish and really miss it. I could buy my channels a la carte, so I didn't have 50 channels I never watched. I only paid about $3,500 for my dish and receiver. Unfortunately, the packages kept going up in price and eventually it just didn't make sense anymore. Also, anytime you had snow or a strong wind, it would put the dish slightly out of balance and then your channels didn't display so the VCR just tapped garbage. Unless you were home to fine tune it, it was worthless. The company that did the adjustments wanted $60 every time to align it. That was in 1993-03. Just didn't make $$ sense. The best part was taping and watching shows a few days in advance. A wednesday show would get beemed down on Monday. That killer Thursday lineup of ER, NYPD Blue, Friends and whatever still beemed down on Thursday, but in the afternoon. So we could sit down and watch them, commercial free, at 6pm and be done before they even aired on local tv.

The best part is there were no artificial restrictions on what you could watch. I could watch feeds in Canada, Mexico or any of the states without being blocked. There was also a lot of interesting 3rd party content; lots of religious stations, people that rented time to produce their own shows and the occasional nutcase prophesizing the end of the world. It was a blast.

I remember one of these in my neighborhood growing up that was painted like Pacman and had a cutout for the mouth, it's still standing i love it

I had one of these on a trailer in front of my house. I lived along a busy road and I let a local satellite tv dealer park it there for advertisement in exchange for free tv. The receiver had the "dealer chip" for the Videocypher II decoder so I had access to all channels. The west coast satellites were too low on my horizon due to trees, so I couldn't get a few of the premium channels. Different channels were on different satellites. For every system sold off that advertising I got to keep the trailer another week. Fun times. With that dealer chip I could even catch uplink feeds so I often caught Star Trek Next Generation episodes a few days before their air date.

I heard a story where HBO took a satellite user to court over watching for free, the lawyer for the guy said "You don't want my client to see your signal, then get it off his property" and the judge agreed and threw the case out. Shortly after that is when they started encrypting the signal and decrypting a signal not meant for you is a crime so they at least had the law on their side after that.

My sister and her husband bought a huge satellite dish (like 3 meters wide) back in 1987. I remember being amazed at all the channels - something like 500 or 1000 - from all over the world and all of it was free at the time.

I remember back in the late 90s when satellite companies first started scrambling channels. It was a weapons race between them and the hackers. In the beginning, it was relatively easy to overcome the primitive encryption, with a leaked password that would last you months. But by early 2000 it was such a hassle keeping up with the newer and stronger encryption. That it had become easier to just pay the monthly subscription. By then the subscription had also fallen in price making it more appealing to most.

What was cool was that you could watch the continuous satellite feed and see people on news sets or sporting events doing things or playing before going live on the air or during commercial breaks. There was once a news anchorwoman who was waiting to go live and ordered something from a magazine using her old school cell phone. She was on camera giving her credit card number and expiration date over the airwaves. I wonder how many hits it got?

My grandfather had a dish that was like 20 ft across in the 90s. As older kids we would tell our younger kid relatives it was because he was still a secret agent. In reality he was a huge Raiders fan, in an out of market area, in a very rural location that never ran cable lines. He got every channel though it was awesome.

At my parents' house, the dish is still standing up, unused for 20 years or more. Other than a place for birds to chill, it's a memory of old times.

As a chines Indonesiaan, my parents had 4m wide parabolic antena for taping chinese tv channel satelote back in 90s and early 2000. The motor system was still analog, and somewhat noisy. When I had to moved the antena, it felt like I was nasa scientist moving antena for Hubble (like in Armageddon movie) 🤣🤣

When I was married to my first wife, we almost bought one. They were hugely popular. You're right. Bazillion channels for free. Her brother worked for a satellite company and he talked us into getting one. It was really expensive and we were going to sign a contract and he would install it for a really low price. Then, the bottom fell out of that market the day before we were going to sign up. That was close. Literally, the very next day, the day we were going to sign up, no one wanted one and he was out of a job a week later.

Didn't realize those were already obsolete when I was a kid. I remember some people still having them in my area in the 90s & don't really ever remember hearing about modern satellite TV services for the first time until sometime close to 2000.

Please do more videos like this. I love knowing more about 90's tech that was always sort of in the background but I never thought much about.

we lived out in the country and the house is 600ft away from the road, so getting cable run all the way back there was quoted at several thousand dollars. So the parents opted for the satellite dish instead. We had that exact same video decipher they showed in this video. I remember the first day we got it installed...first thing we watched was Turkey TV on Nickelodeon. You eventually learn the name of all the satellites and which number on the finder they associated with. 24 channels per satellite. Galaxy 1, Galaxy 2, Satcom 4 etc etc. There even was a special TV guide you could subscribe to. It was as thick as most monthly magazines and was nothing but channel guides. No fancy articles there.

I remember watching a wild feed of The Today Show. While Al Roker was interviewing Garth Brooks, Garth was telling a story about his kids. When they went to commercial, Al started telling Garth about something his own kid did, but it was obvious Garth could not care less about it. He was looking around, and even walked away and started a conversation with someone else nearby. It definitely solidified my suspicions about Garth, and I actually felt kinda bad for Al.

I remembered when I was very young, we took a long drive to see family. They had one of those massive satellite dishes. So every time I see one I always think about those happy times we got to visit them.

My father had one back in late 90s. We moved to a rather remote location so it was the only option to watch TV. One quirk with it was that it would only pick few channels, and if you want to view other set of channels, you have to physically point to dish to another satellite. So we will watch a set of channels for a month or so before switching to another set of channels.

I actually grew up in West Virginia, and I can attest to the fact that these things were everywhere. I liked seeing them, but sadly they've slowly been taken down entirely.

I remember my family getting one when I was younger. We moved from the city to an area where the TV signals were weak. My step-father bought a descramber and got everything. Was I liked about it is that we were able to see shows three hours earlier by watching east coast on the east coast schedule being on the west coast.

Always fun/funny to look back at technology. Actually I still saw these big dishes while working in Alaska, pointing nearly horizontal rather than up. They were so far from the satellites, that they needed these big things to pick up the signals.

My grandma actually had one that functioned in the 90's I remember her changing the channel and watching the progress bar move as the dish repositioned

I used to wonder what happened to these. Now I finally get an answer to a question I had long forgotten but always used to wonder about.

I have one in my backyard. 22 years ago I could change the tv channel and hear it start buzzing and watch it slowly point to a different spot in the sky. Took about a minute to change between certain channels that were far apart. When the receiver stopped working I replaced it with 77 magnetrons from old microwave ovens. Now I use it to melt my enemies from afar

My parents had one that used a metal mesh in pie cut sections for the dish itself. It was cool enough looking, that my dad used the pieces as grill inserts on a custom car he build in the early 2000s.

Born in the mid 80's I kind of remember the tail end of these being used, but mostly the smaller dishes had already taken over by the time I got old enough. However I always thought the large dishes looked cool - specifically the black mesh ones. Honestly to this day, I still kind of wouldn't mind having one set up in my yard even just as decoration lol.

We had one growing up in northern Alberta. My dad would send us out to sweep the snow off of it during the winter. 😂

back in the 1990s, having satellite tv and 400 channels was a flex, a status symbol. my dad had an extra large one in his backyard that was inoperable, and we did not have extra channels. now I understand why

Back in the eighties my parents had that 8-foot dish. Like you said they started scrambling stuff and also the L and B had I had to change out in the 90s to still receive. Since then my parents this place is gone and I have a suspicion that those satellites are still in function so if someone wanted to they could probably still get free channels

This was random and hlarious! As someone who was born in the early 80's, I remember occasionally seeing these in people's yards and I knew they were about picking up television signals, but I had no idea why people really used them. Usually when you asked, you just got the basic response that it was just for television. As time went on, I stopped wondering, but now I finally understand.

"Hundreds of free TV channels from satellite" is still kinda true in Europe and other regions. Although most of them are either international news channels like BBC World or CNN International (although every half-big country has their own), or junk channels like TV shopping or religious evangelism. In some countries you get more or less the same channels as on terrestrial unencrypted, but these are usually broadcast in a narrow beam so they are nearly impossible to receive outside said country. In some other countries a similar offer is encrypted, but you can get a descrambler card for free or very cheap - as another way of region-locking those signals. A notable exception is Germany, who broadcasts 100+ channels of regular TV receivable pretty much all over Europe, unencrypted - including local versions of some that are paid pretty much everywhere else. Tuning into German satellite TV is a nice lifehack to watch some sporting events for free, if you can live with German commentary. All of these are Ku-band, though, so no need for huge dishes.

I only knew the modern small ones as a 2000s kid. But at some place I once saw such a gigantic one and was flattered how cool it looked.

My neighbor installed one in the mid-80s, and he was so proud of all the channels he could get. His TV guide was the size of a magazine. "I can get all kinds of TV - Russian TV, Chinese TV, Europe, everywhere! I can get all the cable and movie channels too!" I glances over his kids glued to their TV - they were watching "Love Boat."

As a General licensed amateur radio operator, I’m impressed at how well this video explains the technical use of using larger dishes. 73

In the town next to the one I grew up in, there was a house next to the interstate with bunch of big satellite dishes in their backyard (and I didn't live in a small farming area with lots of empty land; densely populated suburbs on the outskirts of the main city. Four out of every five backyards were the same size-and not that big) The dishes are long gone, although I still drive by the yard and see remnants of where the dishes used to be

My aunt and uncle still has one in their yard, it’s no longer connected since they got direct TV years back. But they never had it taken down. Now it just collects dead leaves and serves as a massive bird bath.

UK here, we got the big dish sometime in the late 80's i think, i remember being wowed by it and how it moved. I think it could pick up 2 satellites called intelsat and eutelsat or something like that. I remember sneaking down at night and watching the "foreign" channels as they had loads of nudity in them lol.

My grandparents had one of these. But they lived WAY out in the sticks, and there was nothing else available back then. Plus, hand-crank to change the satellite. I got a GOOD workout whenever we went to stay with them.

I'm a logger and flagger for the state of KY and in the mountains I still see these everywhere in people's yards as we find our tress along the meandering country roads. Some look almost new and I'd guess that they still use them for something like mentioned in the video. Very cool! Thanks for the info! 😃

My dad had a friend in the 80's with one of these and a really nice AV setup. One day it took a direct lightning hit and fried almost everything.

My friend's parents had a C-band dish in the 1980s. She said that she could see the raw feeds coming from the networks. Before the network evening news would start up, she could see what the anchors were doing at the news desk to prepare. Sometimes (or maybe all the time) they would swear before the TV broadcast started.

C Band just got most everything below 4 GHz chopped off to make way for "mid band" 5 G. For awhile we had C Band to ourselves, but I remember the very early days when C Band was shared with AT&T Long Lines which used C Band for point to point relay stations for long distance calls and even network TV distribution before the satellites were launched.

I work for a satellite networks company and I couldn't have explained it this clearly. Well done!

My family had one of these. You could watch pretty much anything you wanted. The biggest downside was the dish having to move every time you went to a new satellite. You always missed the beginning of the show/movie.

I remember watching satellite tv at my uncle's house, he had a huge 2m antenna with driver motor so his son and I could select any of the satellites available and then search for interesting broadcasts. Many years later my father also purchased satellite dish, although much smaller and fixed on Astra satellite. It was still a lot of fun to have amost a hundred of programs instead of 2 available locally. I still had two dishes on my roof two years ago, when finally I decided to remove them while installing photovoltaic panels. Although I wasn't using them since ages, I got sad seeing them lying on the ground before being taken to the scrapyard... Something that once brought so much fun, innovation and feel of a better world now became so obsolete that noone would want to take it 😢

I remember the descramblers. It was the first widespread anti-consumer DRM.

Ha! Yes, we had one when I was a kid in the 80s. I remember we used to have to -manually- go out and move it to point to a different satellite (which made a different set of channels available). This went on for years and we eventually got a device that moved it automatically. Then, it became obsolete and just sat unused for years before being removed (not an easy feat as it was huge & had a cement foundation that went down a couple feet or so, for stability.

Friend of mine in 89 had one in his back yard. One night lightning struck it and every single electronic device in his household either exploded, caught fire or both. This included VCR, TVs, computer, fridge, freezer, lamps, Roland keyboard and oven.

I remember these dishes, though we never had one. From what I recall, some schools, institutions, and apartment complexes used them too, to run their own little private cable systems. My middle school even had one on a pole in a tiny courtyard, though I have no idea if it was still in use by the time I was a student in the mid-90s. (I think they had regular cable at an institutional rate by then.) As for scrambling... Like I said in a reply, back in the days of analog scrambling, you could buy gray-market descramblers by mail order. Magazines like _Popular Science_ and _Popular Mechanics_ here in the US always had some sellers in the classified ads in the back. Naturally, the switch to digital made these obsolete. Lots of pay-TV signals got properly encrypted instead, making them pretty impossible to crack unless someone leaked the key -- which did happen sometimes, judging by other comments. 🙂 And on a related note, many of these gray-market sellers also sold Macrovision defeat devices, which dealt with a form of copy deterrent on VHS tapes.* Basically, Macrovision messed with the signal in ways that would trip up most VCRs' tracking and gain control when recording a copy -- but that a TV wouldn't care about when viewing the original. Though not all VCRs were affected by it; older VCRs in particular weren't automatic enough, and Betamax was always impervious to it. Technology Connections has a video about Macrovision, if you want to know more: ukposts.info/have/v-deo/ZYaip4tojYFkzok.html * some DVDs have it too

I actually used to have one of these huge dishes in my backyard in SoCal that my brother and I used to skate in. Dad brought it home from his job that dealt with the large C-Ban dishes everyday and it was a de-commissioned dish. Was quite interesting.

Always wanted one. When I bought my first house in 2000, I put letters in the mailboxes of homes that had ones to see if someone would sell me one. For $50, I got a great 10 foot dish the wiring, and a Drake converter box. This was how I watched TV until 2006 when the last signals up there went away. Fast forward 12 years and it turns out there are now a lot of digital channels up there. I went out and did the same thing and now our new house has a 10 footer that picks up all kinds of strange stuff from outer space. Raw feeds, stations you won't find anywhere else, and 1000's of radio feeds. It's a really cool hobby!

The size of the dish is for signal gain (due to the lower power); it is the receivers and associated components at the focal point that determine the operating frequency. Good video!

I'm from West Virginia and I remember seeing these large satellites everywhere. One of my neighbors had a very large one where I actually climb in the dish and used to slide off of it.

My grandparents who lived in a rural mountainous section of the north western US had one of these old dishes but by the early 90s it wasn't even upright anymore they were using it as a flower bed.

I remember one of my friends in middle school (1999) had one of those dishes and it hadn't been used in 8 years at that point...and he got really into the fingerboarding craze. So his dad just told him that he could have the dish for fingerboarding on the condition that he would no longer use his fingerboards in the house.

plenty people had them in my neighborhood in the 90s, in their front yards! I was fascinated by them as a kid, good to see a video covering this old tech

Born and raised in WV and I remember seeing these everywhere growing up. I drove past one a few days ago and thought, "I wonder what those are/were for because there's no way they're still in use." Good timing on the video!

Hey that's pretty neat. I still see these in people's backyard but they are often covered in junk.

I remember watching a remote feed for a tv channel on C band. Can't remember where they were or what they were there to report about but they had just got their camera set up and were preparing for the channel to put them on the air. The camera showed a dark cloud. A couple minutes later it started to hail. Crew were cussing and diving for cover. When it quit they did their live feed.

Back in 91 my dads boss had a dish. My older brother and I got busted watching Eddy Murphy on HBO because our parents came back and we rushed to change the channel not realizing the dish was going to move as they walked past it.

As a Brazilian, I got most of my knowledge by watching TV and we had one of those, but it don't matches what was said, here, we had "Brasilsat" (and we still have) satellites that were free for everyone to use, no scrambling whatsoever, you only had to have the dish and the receiver and you had access to numerous national grade channels and FM stations from all around the country. Those satellites are still functioning and my cousins use them for free in 2022 (I used it from 1997 to 2012), of course, it also transmits digital channels which are free and you only needs a digital capable receiver to watch it. (Of course, there's the other satellites which transmits paid content and there's illegal receivers to break the encryption, some with two antennas or two LNB's, or one antenna and internet connection, here, they're called "Sky gato", or if you don't want dishes at all, you can go to illegal IPTV streamers which have specialized receivers for it, called "TV Box").

There is still stuff "in the clear" on C-Band satellite. I recommend checking out the UKposts channels Robbie Strike & Northcoaster Hobby for more information on what "in the clear" channels, & other stuff, are available on C-Band nowdays.

My Grandpa bought one of those because we lived in rural NC & back then, the cable companies didn’t go out that far. SO Many channels!!

My parents had one of the first ones from around 1980 at our old house that the previous owners had installed. It was already obsolete and no longer worked by the late 80s, and they never got to use it. This one was fiberglass and even bigger than most of the old C-band dishes that were big. They immediately started trying to get rid of it, but before they were able to do so, in a beyond bizarre occurrence, my dad accidently set part of it on fire when trying to kill a wasp nest on the back of it with gasoline.

I remember my father picking up one of those in the late 1990s (likely for free). It was set up, but I don't think it ever did anything. As a kid I thought it made our house the coolest on the street.

We had one of these dishes as a kid. My dad had some kind of contraption that allowed him to descramble the signal, and every so often he'd have to update it, I guess they routinely changed the way it was scrambled. I remember having to go knock snow off of it in the winter, and shake it to break the ice loose from the gears so it would move. Also I lived in the Appalachian mountains and they were indeed a very common sight.

These were very common in Brazil until 10 years ago because the country is huge, but we used it for public television since a lot of cities the local public channels are few and don't have enough power to reach the whole city. It died out when they switched public channels to digital because the equipment (available there) only allowed analog. We still had the antenna in our house until 5 years ago, although it wasn't being used anymore, we used it until 2014 or so. I think there were around 15-20 public channels.

I recall seeing them on roof tops, and often in back yards and at the colleges (I attended) a few local TV stations as well, always thought they were cool... A couple years ago I recycled a neighbor's dish for them, made about $40.

There is or was actually a man living in Brasil who moved there from Europe. To receive his home channels, he had such an enormous dish set up himself that pointed towards 19.2 degrees to receive TV channels distributed via the satellites in orbit on that position.

The fact that I became an adult too late to own one of those is one of my small lingering regrets.

this was very popular here in Brazil, specially in areas were air tv didn't reach such as areas away from capitals. It was fun to go on a travel to the countryside and have to watch a different signal from popular channels, that normally didn't have any too local programming. I clearly remember that in the timeslot where normally they would air local news, there were cartoons that never aired in the regular channel were I lived. This time before internet got popular was amazing for these small things.

being a early 80's baby I remember our family having one and was fascinated by it, later on my Dad worked at a local TV station and they had the big descramblers that could decode anything, he used to bring home tapes of WWF and WCW wrestling to mail it to family up to a week ahead of time lol. Now I work in Radio broadcast and C band is still alive and well, in March 2022 we installed a brand new C band dish, most major talk shows like Sean Hannity, Rush, ESPN Radio, NASCAR, major sports games, Westwood One (music) as well as NPR (National Public Radio) are all still delivered on C Band with internet being the backup if all else fails.

We had one of these in our backyard when we moved in in the mid 2000s, but it was really old and there was also a smaller one on the side of the roof. Actually, the big one might still be in one or more pieces behind the garage because it was never fully disposed of. One important thing to remember with these is that you don't spill tomato sauce or cheese on them by accident.

Our c-band dish equipment had a 70mhz output that you could connect to a shortwave radio. Back in the 80’s my dad would find telephone satellites and eavesdrop on long distance phone calls.

I was a kid in the late 80s and 90s, we had a big ol satellite well into the 90s, but I grew up in the rural mountains of Western North Carolina and we had to get a descrambler. We had it long enough to where I clearly remember watching my first dirty movie on it, if you were lucky you could find such classy entertainment unscrambled. Those were good times.

I never had or knew anyone personally who had one but growing up as a kid in the 90’s if I did see one I’d look at them with awe because of how cool they looked. I’d only ever see them mounted on big expensive houses or on top of a bar. Lots of bars seemed to have them (to receive sports games for their patrons I suppose.) I thought with the advent of Dishnetwork and DIRECTV’s smaller and more residentially friendly dishes in the US in the late 90’s and early 00’s they had faded into obscurity and wasn’t quite sure about how they came to be in the first place. Thanks for the upload 👍🏻

In Germany you can still use sat-TV as an free alternative to cable TV, for public channels and all free to air private channels. I have over 50 different channels to watch. Nearly all public channels are 720p HD and private channels are 576i SD (not 480p).

UK In the late 90s Sky TV started giving away mini dishes with free installation, the entire country went nuts for them and that's why every 2nd house has a mini dish on it still to this day. On some apartment blocks they are literally smothered in mini dishes on the walls which looks like some dystopian future.

I lived in a very small town. C-Band was the only way to get anything other than a couple of nearby local channels. And even those required an antenna on top of your house to pick up. The picture quality of the C-Band channels was also way better. As good as cable TV in the city. Eventually I got a small dish subscription, so barely use the big dish anymore. Sold the house and it is now gone.

I've been wanting to repurpose my parents old cband dish for amateur radio astronomy. Some pretty neat projects you can do!

They are still in use today to send live events from shows (Grammy’s, concerts, etc) to the network for distribution for broadcast TV or live stream online. C Band also has much better video quality than the pizza pan dishes. Think about it. You can’t fit the same 40mbps video quality per stream (frequency) on a 1/2ft dish that you can on a 10ft dish! The amount of signal strength just isn’t there. That’s why Directv and Dish Network quality looks like ass, because they compress 20 channels to one 40mbps stream so each channel only gets 2mbps (yuck). There are hobbyists that use these large dishes to view these uncompressed high quality feeds today. Why are we selling 4K and 8K TVs but broadcasting 2mbps “HD Lite” feeds? Makes no sense.

When I was a kid I remember someone telling me that satellite dishes didn't have any commercials. I don't know if this is true, but I was told live broadcasts kept running and you could see what they where doing in the studio while the commercials run. For instance during Saturday Night Live you could see them getting ready for the next skit.

My grandpa lived in a rural area in the 1980s and 90s and had the second generation ones, the black perforated kind, on a motorized swivel. Without satellite, he could get a PBS station and maybe ABC, CBS, and NBC. So it was a huge leap forward to get hundreds of stations. He didn't have the black box, per se, even though his dish guy offered it, but about once a month he would plug it into the phone line for the new satellite locations or codes. It was fun being able to watch both the East Coast broadcast of a program, and then catch it again three hours later on Mountain Time.

I used to install satellites and actually worked on a couple of the old dishes that were still able to pick up a channel or two. There are some unscrambled channels still that you can get or could on a free to air set up. I have seen old dishes repurposed into a several things, my friend used a solid sheetmetal for a very large firepit, seen a fiber glass one inverted and used as a dome on the inside of a gazebo roof and expanded/metal mesh one inverted and used as the roof of a metal gazebo/arbor for jasmine to grow on.

This is great!! My grandparents had one of these big dishes in their back yard, and of course, it was hit by lightning and fried the Zenith TV. Good times. I feel old just saying that.

Satellite TV is alive and well for both C and Ku Band, if you're not interested in channels like HBO, ESPN, Discovery there are many Free To Air (FTA) channels available, all you need is a satellite receiver like GT Media or AMIKO, an actuator for your C Band dish and a new C-Band LNB, or for Ku Band you need a 100 cm dish, Ku-Band LNB and a USALS H-H motor. In Europe we use only Ku Band satellite dish is the solution for both cable and Over The Air TV newer TVs have a satellite tuner built and a CI+ Module for Pay TV cable and satellite channels you only get a CI Card to descramble the channels. Also you don't need rabbit ears or rooftop antenna, the channels that are available OTA (Over the Air) are also available on satellite. In Europe you don't have the problem that youlive in a rural area and your antenna doesn't receive a single channels, you mount an 80 - 100 cm dish and you have more than 200 channels. As for North America I recommend Robbie Strike and Northcoaster Hobby channels on UKposts for FTA satellite channels.

Thanks for the nostalgia!! I remember having one of these growing up in the boonies. My dad used to watch shows in Italian and Portuguese that had topless women on the regular. I always thought that it as amazing seeing the TV different programs from all over the world

My mom and dad had one of these. There were several desirable things about it. First, you could pick up all KINDS of stuff you'd normally never see, like the live feed from a reporter about to "go live" on the evening news, picking his nose and eating a sandwich before he's on. Or, I remember watching the series premiere episode of Star Trek The Next Generation the day before it was going to premiere because it was being broadcast to the local TV stations...with NO commercial interruptions! My dad loved it because he could watch just about ANY sports event you can possible think of, with no blackouts, etc. Another great thing about back then was that you could buy your channels ala cart and ONLY pay for the ones you wanted, unlike today where you have to get these packages with tons of stations you don't want and never watch (but still have to pay for). Those days are long gone...

The ISP I work for still has a handful of C-band dishes, though we are finally phasing them out bit by bit because the descramblers are so unreliable!

As I remember those times 1980''s and 1990's , at home I had a 4-meter dish and I saw many channels but I remember that I needed a larger size because the footprint of the satellites required a dish and other channels didn't reach the Transponder signal, I remember the encryption was analog with DigiCipher 1 after version 2, but in both encryptions the video was analogous, it was quite easy to decrypt, but the audio was digitally encrypted so it was more complicated to decrypt. After the use of digital signals MPGE 1 and 2 came, a complete change began both in the equipment and in the encryption of the satellite signals, since there was a wide range of possibilities and of course in the size of the dishes, (Ku band)

I had one of those... I purchased a new home in 1993 and it was in a new subdivision that didn't have cable and the local cable company couldn't confirm a date on when it would be available.. Also the mini dish ( Direct TV and Dish Network ) were still a year or two away, or a year or two away from being a good 2nd option. They were having sever issues keeping a signal locked when it rained or the wind was blowing ( You think it's bad now, you should have seen it with the first gen dish ) so i had to have one of those eyes-sores in my side yard for a few years... And they were a big investment ( $2,600 in 1993 money, today that would be over $5,100 ) And that's just for the dish without service... Where i live it drops below freezing a lot in winter and if you forgot to de-ice the motorized arm ( Back then you had to turn the Dish from satellite to satellite to get different channels and i believe there are between 10-15 of them ) well there goes $150 for a new motorized arm ( I believe i purchased 3 of them within 2 years ) & that was just for the part... So as soon as cable became available 2 years later I gave it away to someone that was willing to dig up the metal post along with the concrete poured around it just to get it out of my yard...

I grew up on c band. I remember my dad always buying different color Videocipher boards to descramble the signals and purchasing the codes locally at the radioshack as if I remember correctly, the video would be working fine but no audio, and when typing in the numeric codes with the remote control to the General Instrument satellite receiver (with the correct board/descrambler inserted into the back of the receiver) would enable the sound for a couple of days before we would have to go purchase the new codes again. In the end we settled on a board we got from a provider that would accept a "hit" on the channels we paid for, I believe it was called Videocipher II+. C Band was a great way to get around the rules of the CRTC in Canada

In my case, in answer to the titular question, trees grow up around and through them. I'd forgotten that it was there for about a decade. It took me half an hour hunting around in new growth cedars to find the remnants.