You can enjoy “basic cable” satellite television without a monthly bill. The picture quality is awesome, the up-front costs are modest and — color us shocked! — it's totally legal.

There’s something inherently new-millennium about watching television that’s been through 45,000 miles of outer space before it turns up on your monitor. If not for the old-style twentieth-century bill that shows up at the end of the month to allow you to keep doing so, satellite TV would be fairly cool.

That bill, however, is a beast.

The unfortunate aspect of video from the sky is that the parties responsible for beaming it down upon the rest of us really know how to charge for it, and they price it in such a way as to make it as expensive as possible. Typically, satellite television programming is sold in large bundles or packages, such that you’ll be compelled to pay for a great many channels to access the few you’re actually interested in.

It didn’t always work this way. The huge ten- and twelve-foot satellite dishes that still haunt the yards of rural homes were much beloved of television viewers for decades, because the content providers who ran them allowed most of the programming they distributed to be bought “a la carte” — that is, one channel at a time.

Those large satellite dishes are referred to as “C-band,” for reasons we’ll get into presently. The paid-for content they received was called “4DTV.” Like the more common small-dish satellite TV, it was paid for by subscribers. Traditional 4DTV signed off for the last time at the end of 2010, and re-emerged in a somewhat different form early in 2011. There’s a discussion of the current state of 4DTV near the end of this article.

Small-dish subscriber-based satellite television — such as Dish Network and DirectTV in the United States and Bell ExpressVu and Shaw Direct in Canada — is referred to as “DSS,” or Digital Satellite Service. DSS typically doesn’t offer a la carte pricing. There’s nothing in the underlying technology that runs satellite-distributed content to prevent satellite companies from selling their programming this way — you’ll notice that they have no problem turning individual channels on and off if you buy a pay-per-view movie — save that they know full well that most of their subscribers would be all over such a pricing structure in a heartbeat.

In Canada, where I live, the equivalent of “basic cable” on DSS satellite — the terrestrial commercial broadcast networks with no premium content — costs over forty dollars a month. Add a few premium channels — such as Discovery and the Canadian equivalent of SyFy — and the bill quickly doubles. It will crowd a hundred dollars a throw with the addition of some movie channels.

The numbers aren’t a lot more favorable in the United States — and they’re a bit harder to nail down, as the prices advertised by satellite television distributors often fail to mention various fees, charges, surcharges and cash grabs until well along in the subscription process.

In addition to the monthly cost of satellite television, most of the companies involved with hooking you up to the sky will require that you sign a draconian agreement which includes some serious fees and penalties should you attempt to disconnect yourself from the force earlier than they anticipated. Like long-term cell phone agreements, these restrictions typically allow you to enjoy satellite television without having to pay for all the equipment it entails up front.

Unlike long-term cell phone agreements, satellite television requires a twenty-five-dollar dish antenna and a simple receiver that’s worth about the same. They’re not slipping you a five-hundred-dollar smart phone.

While we watched a significant amount of broadcast television in earlier epochs, we came to appreciate that we were getting through less and less of it of late. The movies that have been oozing out of Hollywood in recent years have been just this side of unwatchable for the most part, and the monumental series from the premium channels such as HBO and Showtime — The Sopranos, Stargate, Deadwood, Rome and so on — seem to have become little more than historical curiosities.

Upon some reflection and soul-searching, we realized that almost everything we were still watching on broadcast was available on DVDs a few months later. Buying these programs on disc was cheaper than subscribing to a lot of content we rarely looked at, it was a generally better viewing experience... and it left the DVDs around for later re-watching.

If you find conventional satellite television too expensive to justify or too horrifically bad to contemplate, you might be interested to learn that there is an alternative. “Free-to-air” satellite is satellite television without the bills. Once you buy the hardware required to make it happen, it does exactly what it says on the box. It won’t cost you a thing.

The aforementioned hardware is small, simple and relatively inexpensive. All the toys in the box will cost you less than a year of first-tier DSS satellite programming.

I hasten to add that all the “free-to-air” content to be discussed in this article is free because the parties responsible for it deliberately made it free. It’s intentionally available at no cost, in much the same way that terrestrial broadcast television received with an antenna is available at no cost. While the subject will turn up in passing a bit later on, this is not a discussion of pirating DSS satellite television.

Needless to say, free-to-air satellite won’t get you HBO. It’s comparable to basic cable, with a surprising amount of unusual and innovative content on the side, should you find yourself interested in it. In one sense, it’s what broadcasting was a very long time ago, before everyone from the network presidents on down to the old lady who dusts the video cameras started devising new and surreptitious ways to extract money from the rest of us. Some of the broadcasters on free-to-air might be broadcasting out of their garages, but they’re doing some really cool stuff.

Unlike commercial DSS satellite television, there’s no central office for free-to-air satellite TV. In some areas you may find local contractors willing to install and configure the necessary technology for a fee — but once you get a sense of the rapacious nature of this weird little industry, you might well decide to pass on these characters.

If you want free-to-air satellite television, you’re probably going to have to become your own installer.

I hasten to add that this prospect shouldn’t be anywhere near as frightening as it sounds. Most of the hardware required to make free-to-air satellite television work screws together pretty painlessly, and the likelihood that you’ll wind up a drooling shell of a human being muttering incomprehensibly while you repeatedly bang your head against a wall is remote... reasonably remote.

DISCLAIMERS:

Please note the following lawyerspeak — if you read any further, you do so having agreed to and accepted these conditions. If anything herein worries you, click on BACK now.

1. I am not a lawyer. None of the legal issues to be discussed in this article should be regarded as informed legal council. In the event that some of them have a legal bearing on you or on your use of the information herein, you need to discuss them with a real lawyer.

2. I am not a satellite television installer. Everything to be discussed herein was found on the Internet, decoded from badly-translated instruction sheets or discovered by luck. Some of the issues at this page might make real satellite television

installers turn green and speak in terms not suitable for polite company. Nothing in this article should be considered to be expert advice. This said, if I could figure this stuff out, so can you.

3. Everything at this web page is offered “as is” and without a warrantee of any kind. While we’ve undertaken to make it accurate to the best of our abilities, neither Alchemy Mindworks, its suppliers, its shareholders, its employees or the author of this page accept any responsibility for any loss, damage or expense that you incur as a result of your use of the information herein, however it occurs. You agree to indemnify, hold harmless and defend Alchemy Mindworks, its suppliers, its shareholders and its employees and the author of this page from and against any claims or lawsuits, including attorney's fees, that arise or result from your use of the information herein.

4. Specific details of the availability of programming, and of the functionality and availability of the hardware and other products discussed at this page may vary between the time it was written an the time you read it. You agree that none of the parties listed in the foregoing paragraph will be responsible for any inaccuracies or incorrect information included herein.

5. Neither Alchemy Mindworks, its suppliers, its shareholders, its employees or the author of this page undertake to provide support in any form for any reason for your activities based in whole or in part upon the information provided at this page.

All the foregoing means that if you buy a truckload of satellite toys as a result of reading this page and you don’t get to watch television from the sky as a result, you’re on your own.

If you read any further, you’ll appreciate that this is one of the fundamental tenets of free-to-air satellite television. You have to work some of its details out for yourself.

WHAT’S ON

Unlike commercial DSS satellite television, the available content on free-to-air satellite is a bit ill-defined. There’s a great deal of it, but most of it won’t be of interest to you — whomever you find yourself to be. It’s also worth noting that it’s not wholly immutable — that which I’ve listed here as I write this will probably still be in the sky when you read it, but I wouldn’t actually put money on it.

As we’ll get to in greater detail presently, satellite television comes in two flavors. The most commonly-used and technologically-cool satellite television appears in what’s called the Ku-band. It’s received using small satellite dishes of two to three feet in diameter, like the one shown here. This is the realm of DSS satellite, and of some free-to-air content.

The much older C-band satellite television spectrum requires larger six- to twelve-foot satellite dishes to receive it. There’s little encrypted commercial content on it, but there are a great deal more free-to-air stations to be had. The catch is that you’ll need a more extensive dish in your yard to access it.

Here are a few other notable issues about C-band:

• A suitable C-band dish can also receive Ku-band signals — in fact, it can do so better than a

small Ku-band only dish. C-band dishes are typically built as a steel frame covered with mesh, to keep the weight and the wind-resistance of a large dish down to something manageable. In order to receive Ku-band signals, the holes in the mesh should be no larger than one quarter of an inch.

• Back in the day, a reasonable C-band dish needed to be at least ten feet in diameter, with twelve feet being preferable. Better technology now allows six- to eight-foot dishes to accomplish what their bloated ancestors were used for during the twentieth century.

• You can often find C-band satellite dishes that are available for the price of dismantling them and trucking them away. This isn’t always quite the bargain it appears to be, however, as they usually have a lot of rusty bolts that won’t come apart no matter how loudly you curse at them; actuator motors that are seized beyond all hope of further movement and damaged or missing mesh panels. Keep in mind that most of these things won’t have moved or received anything other than pigeons for decades.

• A new mesh-frame C-band dish, with an actuator to move it, costs under five hundred dollars at the moment. This could be said to compare unfavorably to under two hundred dollars for a comparable Ku-band dish and a positioning motor — but there’s a lot more content available with the former.

• Installing a traditional C-band dish is a grander undertaking than would be planting a small Ku-band antenna. You’ll need a larger post, lots of cement and a Saturday to kill. If you live somewhere suburban, you’re arguably more likely to attract the attention of your local government’s thought police with a large C-band dish.

• A solid six-foot C- and Ku-band dish, like the WS International dish pictured later in this article, costs within a few dollars of a steel Ku-band only dish. It requires a larger and as such marginally more expensive positioning motor and an LNBF that's also slightly more expensive, but the total damages to install this dish would be pretty close to the bill of a Ku-band only device. This dish won't enjoy quite the signal strength of its eight-foot cousin, above — your programming is more likely to be momentarily disturbed by bad weather — but it will get both bands. This dish isn't appreciably more work to install than a Ku-band system, and probably not sufficiently large to attract the attention of your local building department.

The free-to-air content on Ku-band as I write this includes a great deal of non-English programming, and you’ll need to weed through it to find channels you actually want to watch. Here are some of the ones I’ve found. The odd notation before the channels names are the satellites that carry these channels. More will be said of them presently.

• AMC 9: Retro TV — all old American television programs, all the time.

• AMC 9: TUFF-TV — testosterone television for guys, serious head-banging.

• Galaxy 28: ABC NewsOne — all the news, all the time. Timely and impeccably produced, this is easily one of the most watchable full-time news stations.

• Galaxy 19: Russia Today — world news from the former evil empire. It’s surprisingly well produced, with no detectable Russian accents — a few subtitles are arguably inevitable — and a perspective that's unlikely to be regarded as currying favor with the west.

• Galaxy 3: China Network Television — there are four CCTV channels, only one of which is in English. This said, it’s fluent, unaccented English, and offers an engaging full-time news service.

• Anik F1: Atlantic Satellite Network — Canadian television from the most visually cool part of the country.

• SES 1: History Channel and The Biography Channel — these appear as encrypted feeds under their real names and as unencrypted feeds on the same satellite as “test” feeds. Despite their ostensibly ephemeral nature, the test feeds have been there for ages, and show no sign of leaving.

• AMC 1: The Pentagon Channel — content for American military personnel.

• AMC 21: PBS, including PBX-X, PBS in high definition, and the PBS Montana station. Our programming will return in just a few minutes, after a short pledge break.

There are also various wild feeds and backhauls to be found on several of the Ku-band satellites — unscheduled bits of video, typically news feeds. New stations pop up from time to time. You might want to check out the forum mentioned at the end of this article to help you spot new free-to-air content.

C-Band satellite improves on this list with a number of network affiliates and other specialty channels, including:

• Galaxy 16: KCWY NBC (Casper, Wyoming), WVXF (St. Thomas), WSJP CW (Aquadilla), WVGN NBC (Virgin Islands), WSJX Fox (Aguadilla), WPRU ABC (Aquadilla)

• Anik F3: WBKI-TV CW (Louisville), KWWF (Waterloo), KQCK (Cheyenne)

• AMC 3: NASA

• Galaxy 17: FX (East and West), Fuel

Prior to reading any further, you might want to check out a list of what’s available on free-to-air

satellite television. The most easily readable one is provided by The Satellite Guys. To correctly interpret this list:

1. Skip ahead in this article and determine what your southernmost satellite is. If you’re located somewhere near the middle of North America, you can assume this will be located at 79° west. Don’t be too concerned what this means right now.

2. In very rough numbers, should you install a satellite dish with a clear view of the entire southern sky — something else we’ll deal with in greater detail presently — you’ll be able to receive signals from up to ten satellites to the east and ten more satellites to the west of your southernmost satellite. Locate these satellites in the foregoing list.

3. The Satellite Guys’ list is conveniently split into links for C- and Ku-band satellites, which might be of some use in helping you decide which dish to install. Keep in mind that a suitable C-band dish will receive both. Review the pages for each satellite you can receive.

4. A not-insubstantial amount of the content listed at The Satellite Guys’ page is encrypted — you won’t be able to view it with a free-to-air satellite receiver. Keep an eye on the Encryption column at each of these pages. Only those channels with no encryption — no text in this field — should be of interest.

5. The same satellites that broadcast free-to-air television also carry radio stations. Most of these are also free, subject to the contents of their Encryption fields. There’s a graphic in the leftmost field of each entry to indicate whether it represents a television station or a radio station.

It's a good idea to make a list of the content you decide is of interest to you, and subsequently review it to decide whether you feel that free-to-air satellite television will satisfy all the couch potatoes at your digs. I hasten to add that none of the free-to-air channel lists on the Internet are entirely accurate — new channels appear from time to time, and a few of them vanish without notice.

You can perform a more formal site survey to determine which satellites you’re likely to be able to receive, based on your view of the southern sky. Having determined which ones look like they have content you’re interested in, use the Sadoun Satellite Look Angles page to determine the compass bearing and elevation for each one. Take a compass and something that can measure angles out to your back yard — an inclinometer, to be discussed later in this article, is an ideal tool for the latter function — and see if you can get a clear view of the sky for each satellite.

Solid obstructions, such as trees and buildings, will prevent your satellite dish from receiving much of anything.

TIP: C-band satellite dishes are referred to as “prime focus” dishes, because they’re pointed directly at the satellites they receive signals from. If you imagine a line beginning at the center of the dish and progressing through the middle of the feed horn, the line in question would eventually intersect a satellite. The geometry of the whole works is pretty obvious. Ku-band satellite dishes are referred to as “offset” dishes. The LNBF isn’t positioned over the center of the dish, and the dish itself is pointed about thirty degrees below the satellites it’s intended to receive. There’s a lot of microwave theory involved in why they work this way, and you really don’t want to know about it. The important bit is that the angle of elevation between your satellite dish and the satellites you’re interested in will be the same either way.

SATELLITE BASICS

One of the great things about commercial DSS satellite television is that you can watch it without having the remotest idea of how it works. This is not a luxury afforded to viewers of free-to-air content.

Satellite television is actually pretty easy to understand... at least, it is at first. The large, multi-syllable words and unpleasant trigonometry will show up later.

An object orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 22,236 miles above the equator will remain in the same place relative to the surface of the planet more or less forever. If the object in question is a relay satellite, you’ll be able to point a receiving antenna — this being a satellite dish — at the satellite in question and receive whatever’s being broadcast by the satellite without ever having to change where the antenna is pointing. This assumes that the ground under the antenna doesn’t shift, and no moose decide to use your satellite dish to scratch themselves.

We see a lot of the latter up here.

Satellite television is transmitted using extremely high frequency radio signals called microwaves. I hasten to add that while these are the same microwaves that can nuke a TV dinner in under three minutes, the power levels involved in receiving satellite television couldn’t cook an amoeba.

For practical purposes, there are satellites in orbit above the equator at an altitude of 22,236 miles every two degrees or so, right around the world. Spaced at two degree intervals, it’s possible for a satellite dish to receive the signals from a satellite you’re interested in without being interfered with by signals from a neighboring satellite.

As an aside, you can’t receive signals from all of the satellites in orbit, as some of them are over the other side of the planet. You can’t point a satellite dish at the ground and hope to receive much of anything.

TIP: Before you start getting hot and excited about installing your own free-to-air satellite dish — or before you get unnecessarily terrified, as the case may be — you might want to step outside with a compass. Assuming that you reside north of the equator, you’ll need a clear view to the south, unobstructed by trees, buildings or other objects which might prove reluctant to get out of the way. Ideally, you should be able to view an imaginary arc across the entire southern sky.

This should suggest one of the first technical issues inherent in receiving satellite television. You’ll need to accurately aim a satellite dish at an object about the size of a minivan 22,236 miles into outer space. Needless to say, at this distance, it will be wholly invisible.

The problem of aiming, or “pointing,” a satellite dish is vastly simplified by some relatively simple trigonometry. The relatively simple trigonometry is simplified still more by any of a number of web pages into which you can type the location of your satellite dish, and from which will appear the

compass bearings and elevation numbers required to align your satellite dish with specific satellites.

For practical purposes, installing a satellite dish requires a web browser, some elementary hand tools — most of them being wrenches — a decent compass and a satellite “finder,” a signal strength meter. A satellite finder costs ten dollars, and it has a total of one control to be concerned with.

A satellite dish consists of two components. The round bit that looks like it could have been used to cook pizzas in another life is the thing that gathers up microwave energy radiating from orbiting satellites. The less obvious bit is the object that hangs in front of the dish and receives the signals the dish collects. The less obvious bit is formally referred to as a “low noise block-converter feed-through,” but you can address it as an LNBF.

An LNBF converts the microwaves from a satellite down to frequencies that can survive a trip through the coaxial cable that will connect your satellite dish to your receiver. It also does a few other useful things, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Pointing a satellite dish for one satellite is gratifyingly simple. The catch in doing so is that the content available to a free-to-air satellite receiver is peppered across a number satellites. The range of visible satellites from wherever you happen to be as you read this is referred to as the “arc.”

Arranging for a satellite dish to receive signals from multiple satellites in the arc is somewhat trickier than pointing one to a single satellite. If you turn out to be interested in a small number of satellites which have thoughtfully positioned themselves very close together, it might be possible to use a elliptical dish, rather than a round one, and several LNBFs positioned over the face of the dish, one for each satellite.

This arrangement is used by commercial DSS satellite companies to allow a single dish to receive signals from adjacent satellites. It’s tricky at best to set up if you want to address lots of satellites, as will usually be the case for free-to-air television.

The alternative to a five-headed mutant satellite dish is a single dish with a motor to move it between satellites. For about seventy dollars, you can bolt a small satellite dish onto a very sophisticated software-controlled positioning motor that will unerringly point it at whichever satellite takes your fancy.

At this point, it’s probably worth mentioning that the current generation of free-to-air satellite receivers are probably just as complicated as hell inside, but they keep their complexities to

themselves. Once it’s been configured, watching satellite television on one of them is about as complicated as playing a DVD. For example, as of this writing, you can find PBS Montana on the AMC-21 satellite located at 125° west, on transponder 20 at a frequency of 12104 megahertz with vertical polarity. Fear none of this — your satellite receiver will present you with a list of favorite channels. If you select PBS Montana, it will move your dish to 125° west and configure its other parameters to receive the channel you’re interested in.

Admittedly, you’ll need to set up your receiver so it knows where all those channels are, but this isn’t nearly as frightening as it probably should be. Satellite dish motors for free-to-air television include sophisticated internal processors that handle most of the sweat involved in aligning the beasts. We’ll get to the details presently.

A BRIEF DIGRESSION CONCERNING MICROWAVES

Microwaves are very, very high frequency radio signals. They exist in the radio spectrum above the UHF frequencies over which cellular telephones communicate. Microwaves have a number of characteristics that are handy if you happen to be relaying television signals through outer space, most notably that they enjoy traveling in straight lines.

The straight line in question is the one from the big, frightening-looking uplink dish where they’re wrought up to a satellite, and then from the transmission antenna of a satellite to your back yard. These two journeys are formally called the uplink and the downlink of a signal.

Back in the heady days of the twentieth century, when satellite television involved really big C-band dishes, the frequency range of C-band was divided into twelve blocks of spectrum, each one wide enough to carry one analog television signal. However, it turns out that microwaves exhibit another useful characteristic, this being polarity. The antenna that transmits microwaves is a short length of metal. If the transmitting antenna is positioned so it’s vertical, the receiving antenna must also be vertical, or it won’t receive anything.

This meant that each of the twelve frequency blocks available to a C-band satellite could be used twice — once with a vertically-oriented antenna, and once with a horizontally-oriented antenna. As such, each satellite had twenty-four channels, referred to as twenty-four “transponders.”

The position of a microwave antenna — that is, whether it’s horizontal or vertical — is referred to as its “skew.”

In old C-band satellite dishes, the “feed horn” — the C-band equivalent of an LNBF — came equipped with a tiny motor that would orient the receiving antenna either horizontally or vertically, depending on the the channel its owner wanted to watch. Contemporary LNBFs just have two internal antennas, which are switched electronically.

An LNBF that uses antenna skew is called a “linear” LNBF. This is distinguished from circular LNBFs, as used by DSS satellites. Imagine radio waves traveling in a spiral pattern, like a corkscrew. Nothing in this article will get involved with circular-polarity LNBFs.

While C-band satellite television still exists, virtually all satellite transmissions had switched to digital by the end of the twentieth century. Each of the original 24 analog transponder frequency blocks carries lots of digital signals. While it’s rarely necessary to know all the numbers associated with a specific satellite channel, or “feed,” you’ll find them specified something like this:

PBS MontanaAMC-21125° west12104 VTP 20

The free-to-air satellite feed for PBS Montana can be found on the satellite at 125° west, on transponder 20, at a frequency of 12,104 megahertz, using vertical polarity.

In practice, your satellite receiver will deal with all this head-banging for you.

Television relay satellites are located in space based on the number of degrees they’re removed from the zero’th meridian, this being a north-south line running through Greenwich, England. The foregoing satellite is 125 degrees west of it. Each satellite has a name — actually, most of them have at least two names, as the same satellite will be used to relay both C-band and Ku-band signals. The satellite in the foregoing example is called AMC-21 if you’re watching Ku-band and Galaxy 14 if you’re watching C-band.

As an aside, should you care about such things, C-band satellite television exists in the range of 3.7 to 4.2 gigahertz. Ku-band satellite television occupies 11.2 to 14.5 gigahertz. These are still more numbers that your satellite receiver will defend you against having to remember.

As another aside, it’s probably worth noting that were you to stand in your back yard with compass and gaze into the sky 125 degrees west of what the compass defines as south, you would not be staring at the invisible silhouette of satellite AMC-21. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the position of a satellite only reflects its absolute compass bearing if you happen to be living in

Greenwich, England — or somewhere else on the zero’th meridian. The second is that compasses point to magnetic north rather than true north, which isn’t quite the same thing for most of the planet.

In pointing a satellite dish based on a compass bearing, you’ll need to allow for the difference between magnetic north and true north, or the “magnetic deviation.” Fortunately, the web page that calculates where to point your dish will work all this out for you, and provide you with the actual compass bearing to align it to.

TIP: Ku-band microwaves are degraded by bad weather. This is less of an issue for C-band microwaves. At such time as you set about planting and subsequently aligning a Ku-band satellite dish, choose a sunny day for the undertaking. Finding satellites is sufficiently tricky without heavy clouds soaking up most of their signals.

SHOVELS IN THE GROUND FOR Ku-BAND

Watching Ku-band free-to-air satellite television — that’s the one that gets by with a small dish — will require some specific hardware, to wit:

1. A Ku-band satellite dish: These are typically about three feet in diameter, made of steel, and a bit funky. Smaller dishes will work, but with somewhat reduced signal quality and an increased likelihood that this week’s episode of The Simpsons will blow away if it happens to be raining. Snarly weather degrades Ku-band microwaves. Dishes much larger than three feet are largely a waste of sky for Ku-band. A Ku-band satellite dish will include the dish itself, mounting hardware to attach it to something and an arm to hold its LNBF. These things cost fifty to sixty dollars.

2. An LNBF: The actual receiver that collects the microwave signals bounced around by a satellite dish, an LNBF is a small microwave antenna and some electronics. Free to air satellite television requires the simplest sort of LNBF — it should be linear, have a single feed and will probably use an intermediate frequency, or IF, of 10.750 megahertz. More than one feed on your LNBF isn’t an issue, if that’s all your satellite shop happens to have, as you can just ignore the superfluous ones. Plan on ten to twenty dollars.

3. A satellite dish motor: As has been discussed previously, a satellite dish motor will move your satellite dish between satellites. The size and price of the motor you choose will be based to some extent on the size of the dish you use. Not all satellite motors are created equal — we’ll get into a few of the available choices in a moment.

4. Something vertical: You’ll need to attach your satellite dish and its attendant hardware to a vertical object such that it can have a clear view of the southern sky, from horizon to horizon or as much of it as is realistically possible. The object in question must be plumb vertical, and it needs to stay that way on a long-term basis, lest your dish go out of alignment and find itself pointing into the uncharted reaches of the cosmic void. As a rule, any television signals that arrive from the cosmic void will be in an alien language, and several million years old. The side of a house will work — we use a large steel pipe set in concrete out in our east meadow, but I appreciate that not everyone has an east meadow to plant one of these

things.

5. Coaxial cable: The long black wire that connects your satellite dish to your receiver is an important component of the system — it’s just not a very interesting one. There are a number of fairly exotic forms of this stuff — the one that’s filled with pressurized nitrogen sounds seriously high-tech — but for practical purposes, RG-6 coax works fine. You can buy it with its connectors already installed, saving you the cost of a connector crimping tool and several bruised fingers learning to work one. Plan on about ten dollars for the wire.

6. A receiver: There are as many of these as there are stars in the firmament, or as there are tall tales among the people who peddle them for a living. Be wary of the latter. We’ll get into a bit of receiver lore presently. Receivers can be had for as little as fifty dollars — reasonable ones cost about two hundred.

7. A satellite finder, an inclinometer and a compass: A satellite finder is a signal strength meter that connects between the LNBF on your satellite dish and your receiver. It will tell you the relative strength of the received signal, and it will also scream a lot — an audio indicator will get louder as the signal strength increases, allowing you to adjust the position of a satellite dish without looking at the meter. There are very elaborate satellite meters available for hundreds of dollars, which are well worth having if you plan to make a career of installing satellite dishes. For the rest of us, simple satellite finders cost ten dollars.

An inclinometer is a plastic scale measured in degrees with a weighted pointer, such that the angle of the object the inclinometer is placed on can be accurately measured. These devices are available at hardware stores for about ten dollars.

Finally, you’ll need a decent engineer’s compass, which allow you to accurately sight along a specific compass bearing. The definition of “decent” in this context is a compass that includes internal damping, such that it will settle down to a specific bearing before nightfall. Really cheap compasses that don’t do this will cause you to pound your forehead against the steel post upon which is mounted your satellite dish in time. You have been warned.

Most free-to-air satellite retailers will sell you a ten dollar satellite finder in a box along with a compass and a battery pack for about twenty dollars. The compass is usually a reprehensible copy of an engineering compass with no damping, and the battery pack is useless, as the meter will be powered by your receiver. Save yourself ten bucks — just buy the meter.

Devising something upon which to bolt your satellite dish is beyond the scope of this article — you’ll probably want to Google for a solution that's appropriate for your circumstances. If you

choose to use a steel pipe in the ground, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• You will need to pour cement to hold your pipe in place, and lots of cement will make it far less likely to move in the years to come, necessitating that you trek out to your dish in the middle of winter and re-point the beast. Cement is messy — deal with it.

• A smooth, cylindrical hole with cement poured into it will prevent ground heaving from moving the resulting column of cement. A hole with rough or irregular sides will allow the ground to grab your cement when it heaves, and move your satellite dish. See the bit about trekking out to your dish in the middle of winter, above.

• Be really, really sure to determine the maximum pipe diameter your dish motor’s mounting bracket will accommodate before you plant something that’s beyond digging up. A pipe that’s half an inch too small is trendy. A pipe that’s half an inch too large is something of a problem.

Assembling a satellite dish and subsequently setting it up on a drive motor is laughably easy, as long as you’re reasonably competent at reading instructions in bad English inexpertly translated from Chinese. If there are no bolts left over when you’re done, it went together correctly.

TAKING THE POINT

Initially pointing your newly-installed satellite dish can be a daunting task... you’ll need to accurately align it to a number of the aforementioned minivan-size objects 22,236 miles into outer space without being able to see them. In that said satellites are about two degrees apart — which represents about 900 miles of sky if you happen to be a geo-stationary satellite, but little more than the thickness of a liberal election promise down here on earth — finding them, and then determining whether you’ve found the correct one, is an adventure.

You can delete a few of the lions and most of the more bad-tempered alligators from your adventure by initially pointing your satellite dish correctly, and then following some fairly simple guidelines for working through the satellite arc. None of this stuff is rocket science, however many rockets might have been involved in orbiting the satellites you’ll be after.

To begin with, you’ll want to visit Bill Sadoun’s magic dish pointing page. Based on Google Maps, all you need do to get started pointing your satellite dish is type in your current street address, and work through the available satellites until you find the one that points straight down, or due south. The page will provide you with lots of helpful numbers. Specifically, it will tell you:

• Your exact longitude and latitude: Location is everything. You’ll need to know where you are, as this will affect where the satellites you’re interested in are relative to you.

• The elevation for your dish: This is the number of degrees above the horizontal your dish will need to be raised to find the southern-most satellite... sort of. Stick a pin in this one for a moment.

• The azimuth for your southernmost satellite: Yes, you do get to use words like “azimuth” to install one of these things, which is unquestionably cool. The azimuth is the number of

degrees west of the zero’th meridian to find your southernmost satellite. The southernmost satellite will be the one that's closest to your longtude. This page will provide you with your true azimuth — nice to know but totally useless, except for picking a southernmost satellite — and the actual compass bearing azimuth, allowing for the corrected magnetic deviation for your location, which is invaluable.

Entering my location into the page, I learned that:

• My southernmost satellite is AMC 5 Satcom C3 at 79.0° west. • My latitude is 45.3261° north. • My longitude is -79.2203° — negative longitude values reflect the western half of the world. • My dish elevation is 37.9° • My true azimuth is 179.7° • My magnetic azimuth is 190.9°

Armed with these numbers, you’ll be ready to point your satellite dish for the first satellite in your arc. In my case, this works out to be AMC 5 Satcom C3. It has a single viewable channel as of this writing, a Spanish-language feed called KTEL-TV. It appears in a blind scan as “CH 01.”

To begin with, you’ll want to make sure that the positioning motor for your satellite dish is at the center of its range. They usually have a scale around the upper half of the mounting tube that holds your satellite dish, with a pointer on the tube itself. The manual for your motor will address how to return it to its center, or its “zero point,” should it be otherwise.

TIP: It’s usually a bit difficult to see the scale on a positioning motor, as the best place to locate your head to do so will be occupied by your satellite dish. Most positioning motors have a mechanical switch that’s tripped as the motor passes its zero mark. Listen carefully as the motor rotates and you’ll hear the switch, allowing you to locate the zero position by ear.

Having scoped out the motor’s position, you should find a scale marked on the side of the motor mount for your satellite dish. This represents your current latitude, that is, how far north or south of the equator you find yourself. In dealing with these numbers, keep in mind that the initial setup of your dish will be something of an approximation.

In my case, my latitude is 45.3261°, so I loosened the bolts on the motor mount and adjusted the scale to point very slightly above 45.

You’ll need a compass for the next bit. As noted earlier, you should use a decent engineering compass with a dampened dial, so it doesn’t take half an hour to settle down and provide you with an accurate reading. It should look like the one illustrated elsewhere in this article.

You’ll need to site a bearing along the magnetic azimuth provided by Mr. Sadoun’s web page, discussed a moment ago, and twist the clamps that hold your satellite dish to whatever you’ve bolted it to such that it’s pointing in precisely that direction. Back in the days of huge C-band dishes, which were comprised of mesh one could see through, this was actually quite easy to accomplish. It’s a bit more of an effort for a wholly opaque steel Ku-band dish. I usually crouch down and peek under the dish.

If your satellite dish is bolted to the wall of your house, such that getting behind it to sight its azimuth would be largely impossible unless you can figure out how to make the atoms of your body

merge with those of the brickwork, you’ll probably have to take several tries at this.

Finally, you’ll need to set the elevation of your satellite dish. This typically works by finding the base elevation of your motor mount — hopefully in its manual — and subtracting the elevation as provided by the dish pointing page, above. There will be an elevation adjustment on the side of the dish mount. I should note that while setting your satellite dish to the correct elevation is a good place to start, I’ve yet to see one of these things work out so the correct elevation, as determined by the signal quality of the television it received, matched the calculated elevation.

At least in theory, your satellite dish will now being pointing to the southernmost satellite for your location. In practice, this is about as likely to have occurred as pigs are to fly, but don’t be discouraged. Setting one of these beasts up is an exercise in fudging the math.

One of the oft-overlooked bits in installing a free-to-air satellite dish is setting the LNBF skew. The skew is the amount by which the LNBF should be rotated from vertical to compensate for the displacement of your location from true south. Once again, Mr. Sadoun’s web page, mentioned earlier, will provide you with the correct skew value in degrees for your LNBF. Hold the inclinometer mentioned earlier on top of your LNBF and rotate it until the pointer of the inclinometer indicates the skew number for your location.

TIP: LNBF skew is also something of an approximation. Once you get everything else working, have someone with a loud voice watch or one half of a pair of walkie-talkies watch the signal quality display provided by your satellite receiver — to be discussed in more detail presently — and read the numbers off as you fine tune the LNBF skew position out at your dish.

The coaxial cable that connects your satellite receiver to your satellite dish is a busy little conduit. It will send television signals from your dish to your receiver, but it will also send power and motor positioning commands from your receiver to your dish. At the moment, the bit you’ll be interested in will be the power. Power from your receiver will light up your LNBF, run your positioning motor and — at least temporarily — provide power for your satellite finder.

Connect the satellite finder between your LNBF and your receiver — you’ll find labels on the back of the satellite finder to indicate which connector goes to which cable. Run inside and turn on your receiver. The scale of your satellite finder will have lit up by the time you return to your dish, and you might hear a whine that suggests a large squirrel deflating. Try to ignore the latter... you won’t be able to, of course, but it’s character-building.

Adjust the signal strength knob on the satellite finder until the meter’s pointer is about mid-scale,

and the whine isn’t wholly deafening. Loosen the bolts that hold your positioning motor to whatever you bolted it to, and rotate the motor ever so slightly right to left, covering no more than about two degrees of its possible travel. This usually corresponds to hitting it once with your fist. You should find a position that represents the highest signal strength, as indicated by the most deafening whine — when you’re satisfied that you’ve done so, crank the bolts down again.

In looking for the signal from a satellite, note that the aforementioned cosmic void of outer space generates a significant amount of microwave energy all by itself. If you turn up the signal strength knob of a satellite finder, it will eventually indicate that a signal is present, even if you’ve managed to missed every satellite in the sky by a measurable portion of a light year.

Actually, it’s probably worth noting that a ten dollar signal strength meter isn’t one of the most sophisticated bits of technology you’re likely to encounter. These things suffer from limited resolution. As such, if you turn one up high enough to whine audibly for cosmic background radiation, it will bury its needle when you find a real satellite. This will require that you turn the signal strength on the meter down a bit once you find a satellite, such that you can tell precisely where the signal peaks as you move the dish.

Having worked out the correct azimuth for your satellite dish based on signal strength, loosen the elevation bolts and repeat the procedure to adjust the elevation for the best possible signal strength. This can be a bit fiddly, as the elevation bracket for Ku-band satellite dishes is typically fairly cheesy.

TIP: The entire mounting structure for a Ku-band satellite dish is fairly cheesy, but this can be helpful in aligning one. Once you think you have its signal peaked, push the dish slightly side to side and then up and down. If the signal strength diminishes in each case, it’s where it’s supposed to be. If it improves in one direction when you’ve pushed the dish, you’ll need to return your attention to your wrenches.

When you’ve peaked the signal strength for your satellite dish to your satisfaction, you can discover what you’ve actually aligned it to. Go inside and park yourself in front of your television set like a dedicated couch potato. With remote control firmly in hand, navigate the menus of your satellite receiver until you find the bit that offers to let you perform a “blind scan.” The location of this function will vary between receivers — it usually turns up in the motor setup page.

A blind scan involves your receiver looking for a recognizable satellite feed on every permutation of every transponder it can find. Because digital television signals typically include a feed name as text buried in their data streams, your receiver will be able to display a list of what it finds. Blind scans are time consuming — plan on several minutes up to half an hour for older, more primitive receivers to complete one.

When your receiver has completed its blind scan — or, if you’re slightly impatient, when it’s found at least half a dozen named feeds — you’ll need to compare what it’s found to a list of the feeds on known satellites to see which satellite your dish is actually pointing to. Keep in mind that with just two degrees separating them, it’s not at all unlikely that you’ll have actually pointed your dish one or two satellites away from the one you intended to look at.

I find the LyngSat listings useful for finding satellites — here’s a link for the listing for AMC 2/5.

In the event that your southernmost satellite is different, you’ll find links near the upper right corner of the LyngSat pages to switch satellites. Compare the names of the programs your blind scan found to the ones in the listing for the satellite you think you pointed your dish to. If they don’t match, try the LyngSat listing for adjacent satellites until your find one that does.

If you discover that you’ve initially pointed your dish to the wrong satellite, loosen the bolts that hold your positioning motor to its post, swing it slightly in the direction of the satellite you’re after, and repeat the foregoing steps to peak the signal strength. Perform another blind scan.

TIP: Make sure that the tube that connects your satellite dish to its motor mount and the bracket that connects your dish to the tube have no play in them. If your dish can be made to move from side to side when it’s stationary, something’s not as tight as it should be. A loose dish will flop around when it’s being positioned, and drive you quietly mad as you attempt to align it. If the motor mount tube itself is loose, see the manual for your motor to determine how to tighten it. If your mounting bracket is loose, break out the wrenches.

Once you’ve correctly located your southernmost satellite, you should be able to save the results of your blind scan to the program guide for your receiver. Should your southernmost satellite in fact be a populous free-to-air satellite, such as Galaxy 19, you’ll likely want to edit this at some future time, to remove the fundies, the Korean music videos, the middle-eastern movie channels and the news programs from Armenia. It’s all interesting stuff, of course — save for the fundies — but it’s not all that much use if you can’t understand a word of what’s being said.

As an aside, when last I looked, Galaxy 19 offered about half a dozen potentially interesting English-language programs. Russia Today is arguably the best of them — you’ll never look at CNN in quite the same way again.

OWN THE SKY

Having located your first satellite — and yes, that was the easy bit — you’re now ready to locate the rest of them. This involves having your satellite dish correctly track the arc of satellites as it appears from your back yard. This is the aspect of installing a free-to-air satellite system which has been known to make strong men shriek at the vicissitudes of the universe and choose instead to watch a radio.

Ku-band satellite positioning motors have a sophisticated system for positioning themselves and the dishes they’re connected to. In fact, they have two of them. The first is called DiSEqC 1.2, and the second is called DiSEqC 1.3 or USALS. That funny word means Digital Satellite Equipment Control and is pronounced dee-sec.DiSEqC 1.2 allows a satellite receiver to position a satellite dish by stepping it east or west from its zero point in small, precise increments. USALS allows a positioning motor to know exactly where

each satellite is located, such that the receiver call tell its motor “go to AMC 3” and let the motor figure out where on the arc to position itself.

USALS is way easier to configure.

The important catch in using USALS is that a substantial number of the receivers that claim to support it... don’t. At least, they don’t support it correctly, or reliably. In the event that your receiver is an exception to this unfortunate observation, you’ll be able to position your satellite motor to zero, locate your first satellite and break out the really good beer.

Should you find that USALS doesn’t work for you — typically indicated by your receiver sending USALS commands to your positioning motor and your motor driving itself wildly about the sky, locating precisely nothing — you’ll need to revert to the slightly more primitive DiSEqC 1.2 protocol.

Note that when you get to the screen in your satellite receiver that deals with motor positioning, you’ll have the option of selecting USALS or DiSEqC 1.2 — in our current receiver, the latter is referred to as simply “enable motor.” Be sure you select the correct motor protocol — USALS if it works, or DiSEqC 1.2 if USALS proves to be too funky to use — when you’re pointing your satellite dish.

The rest of this discussion will deal with locating the arc of Ku-band satellites using the DiSEqC 1.2 protocol.

Having correctly located your southernmost satellite, you’ll be able to locate all its neighbors by tuning your receiver to a transponder known to be active on an adjacent satellite, and stepping slowly in its direction until you find the beast.

In my case, having correctly positioned my satellite dish to point to AMC 2/5 at 79° west, I note that, according to the LyngSat page, AMC 9 at 83° west offers Tuff TV. This feed appears at a frequency of 11735, with horizontal polarity, a symbol rate of 4444 and a FEC of 3/4. I configured my receiver to these values — the screen to do so will vary from receiver to receiver — and I started stepping slowly west from 79° west.

TIP: As you work your way across the arc to find your second satellite, count the number of times you have to hit the approprate button on your receiver's remote control until the nearest satellite appears. Subsequent satellites at the same spacing will require more or less the same number of steps to reach them — the apparent distance will increase slightly as you approach the ends of the arc. Counting the steps required to move from one satellite to the next will assist you in determining whether you've totally missed the one you're looking for, too.

Your receiver will show you two numbers to indicate what it’s receiving — the signal strength and the signal quality. The signal strength value is typically the amount of signal energy it’s seeing oozing through its coaxial feed cable. Assuming that your satellite dish is working at all — which it will be if you’ve successfully located your southernmost satellite — this number is largely meaningless.

The signal quality value will tell you when you’ve found a satellite. It will be zero until such time as you do.

I kept stepping west until the signal quality value increased above zero, indicating that I’d found the AMC 9 satellite. I adjusted the dish position to arrive at the highest quality value, and stored the satellite position. I then scanned the satellite to see what was on it — that Tuff TV was one of the transponders the scan located confirmed that I’d found the correct satellite — and saved the scan.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC

Once you’ve located your first few satellites, setting up the rest of the arc should be reasonably easy. Notice the use of the word “should.” The putative ease involved is predicated upon your dish and motor having been correctly aligned such that it tracks the entire satellite arc correctly.

In the event that the foregoing isn’t the case — a not uncommon instance, this being an imperfect universe and all — you’ll find that you’re unable to find the satellites that should be there as you work your way outward from your southernmost satellite. The first few will appear as you’d expect them to, but as you reach the extremes of the arc, you’ll be listening to the great cosmic void and not a lot else.

There’s questionable entertainment value in listing to the great cosmic void on a long-term basis.

If the outer edges of the satellite arc generate nothing but silence, your dish isn’t tracking the arc correctly. Once of the regrettable issues in setting up a Ku-band satellite dish is that these things are a bit twitchy, with little margin for error.

There are, in fact, two specific issues that can be responsible for a failure to track the entire satellite arc, to wit:

1. The shape of the actual satellite arc and the shape of the arc being traveled by your dish are slightly different.

2. The arc being traveled by your dish is offset slightly to the east or the west of the actual satellite arc.

If the satellites at the extremes of your arc aren’t turning up, it might not be apparent which of the forgoing problems you’re looking at.

As an aside, it’s probably worth noting that the initial elevation, azimuth and latitude values you used to install your satellite dish were no doubt mathematically correct, but they’re still just reasonably accurate guesses. Addressing the issue of your dish failing to track the arc involves more than just making sure you have everything dialed in correctly.

To adjust your satellite dish such that it tracks the entire arc, you’ll need to determine why it’s currently failing to do so. Here’s the plan:

1. Use your receiver to point your dish to your southernmost satellite — this was 79° west in my case.

2. Use your receiver to move west to the next satellite — this would be 83° west for me.

3. Repeat step two until you can’t find a satellite. It’s a good idea to write down what you find.

4. Return to your southernmost satellite.

5. Use your receiver to move east to the next satellite — this would be 77° west for me.

6. Repeat step five until you can’t find a satellite.

If the universe isn’t in too strange a mood, the result of the foregoing excursion across the firmament should nail down the issue with your dish. Should the satellites prove to disappear at the same distance in both directions, your dish is tracking an arc of the wrong shape. If one half of the arc has more satellites than the other, the zero point of your dish is slightly displaced from “true” south.

If your dish is failing to track the correct arc shape, adjust its latitude setting up or down by a degree or two and repeat the above procedure — and you’ll need to guess at whether to begin with “up” or “down.” If you find fewer satellites as a result of your initial latitude adjustment, you went the wrong way.

If your dish isn’t quite adjusted to true south, loosen the bolts that hold the dish motor to its post, move the entire motor and dish assembly ever so slightly in the direction where the fewest number of satellites turned up. Tighten the bolts and repeat the above procedure.

In practice, fine tuning the shape or the azimuth of your satellite arc will blow away most of a day. In our case, there was a visible wear pattern in the grass between the house and post where the dish is mounted.

SHOVELS IN THE GROUND FOR C-BAND

I find myself enjoying a degree of affection for C-band satellite. We’ve watched television using a C-band dish for about a quarter of a century as I write this. While large and somewhat maintenance-intensive, C-band satellite dishes are a pleasure to align and use, compared to their smaller and much more exacting Ku-band cousins.

You’ll unquestionably encounter the acronym BUD in reference to C-band satellite dishes. This stands for “big ugly dish.” I find them to be a good deal more attractive than lawn flamingos, minivans and artificial deer. Admittedly, ours is far enough from the house that you’d have to be looking for it.

Traditional C-band dishes use a polar mount and a linear actuator to move the dish — this is essentially a long screw with a servo motor at one end. This mechanism is simple and robust, and it can move a fairly heavy dish reasonably quickly. However, it can’t quite cover the entire satellite arc.

As microwave technology has improved and C-band dishes have gotten smaller, it’s become possible to put one on a horizon to horizon motor, just like the motors that drive Ku-band dishes. The device to your right is a six-foot dish made by WS International that can receive C- and Ku-band. It costs about seventy dollars as of this writing. It’s available from Galaxy Marketing, along with the hardware required to connect it to the sky.

This section won’t get into installing a C-band satellite dish in detail, because there are all sorts of variations and perversities of these devices. If your yard isn’t currently graced with one and you don’t like the general hugeness of the parts involved, it’s worth noting that most communities have at least one television repair guy or antenna installer who’s old enough to remember the glory days of C-band satellite television. These things are neither difficult nor unreasonably expensive to install if you won’t be doing the work yourself.

In our case, we had a C-band dish already in place — it had been orphaned by the demise of 4DTV, discussed earlier in this article. I hasten to add that its time as an orphan ran for less than a day, as re-tasking it for free-to-air reception was largely effortless.

As I mentioned earlier, a linear LNBF needs to orient its antenna either horizontally or vertically, depending upon what it’s being asked to receive. Back in the twentieth century, this was managed by having the antenna in the LNBF — or more properly, the “feed horn,” as they’re called for C-band dishes — attached to a small servo motor. Satellite receivers of the period had control wires to drive the positioning servo and hence set the skew.

Needless to say, contemporary free-to-air receivers don’t have separate skew adjustment wires.

The motor positioning mechanism for older-style C-band satellite dishes is also elegantly simple or breathtakingly crude, depending upon your perspective. The linear actuator I mentioned earlier was connected to two wires that ran back to the satellite receiver charged with moving the dish. The receiver sent pulses to the actuator to rotate it in increments of a few degrees right or left. The receiver worked out where to point its dish by counting pulses.

This, too, is something a free-to-air receiver will want nothing to do with.

In order to drag an old-style C-band dish into the new millennium, you’ll need to replace its antique feed horn with something that doesn’t involve motors, and add a device to convert DiSEqC commands to linear actuator pulses.

In our case, this involved removing the existing feed horn from the dish and installing a WS International DMX 741 feed horn. The latter device is the same size as a traditional feed horn with all the same bolt holes, but it can be configured to receive both C- and Ku-band signals, and it sets its skew electronically, just like a Ku-band LNBF.

Winding the C-band dish down to the western end of its arc got its feed horn close enough to ground level to reach it with a painter’s ladder. Only one of the bolts holding the old feed horn in place was seriously rusty, and it eventually yielded to reason and profanity.

The device we use to let a free-to-air receiver position our C-band dish is called a GBOX V3000 Positioner. Both it and the DMX 741 feed horn came from Sadoun Satellite, mentioned earlier. While the instructions for these devices are somewhat terse, and arguably presuppose that they’ll be read by someone who knows what he or she is doing, the whole works went together in less than an hour, and worked pretty much right out of the box.

The only serious issue with the dish positioner is that there’s no way to determine how the two wires that connect it to an actuator motor should be installed. You need to wire the beast up and use the positioner to move the dish. If the dish travels in the wrong direction, the wires are backward, and need to be interchanged.

Things were so much simpler back in the twentieth century.

The GBOX positioner is pretty effortless to use, and it offers the added feature of displaying an arbitrary numerical position value for whatever it’s pointing your dish to. This makes initially locating satellites with one a great deal easier.

In setting up the C-band dish to receive free-to-air satellite television, we used the old 4DTV receiver to park it at the satellite at 125° west — what 4DTV called Galaxy 5, and free-to-air satellite systems know as Galaxy 14 for C-band and AMC 21 for Ku-band. As such, the free-to-air receiver had found its first satellite as soon as it was switched on. Because the C-band dish was already aligned, having been receiving 4DTV for the previous decade or so, it didn’t matter that this wasn’t the southernmost satellite.

TIP: If you find yourself upgrading an existing C-band dish for use with free-to-air content, such that you have the opportunity to park it at a known satellite before you break out the wrenches, you might want to make a note of its initial position, such that you can return to a known satellite if you subsequently find yourself lost in the trackless reaches of outer space. Mark the rim of the dish near the bottom with a spot of paint and bang a stake into the ground immediately below it.

Locating satellites for C-band with a dish the size of Cleveland is a great deal easier than doing so for Ku-band. I used the receiver to move the dish slightly to the east and had it do a blind scan, locating Galaxy 18 at 123° west. Once the receiver had found Galaxy 18, I fine-tuned its position to peak the signal.

While they’re often named differently for C- and Ku-band, there’s effectively only one satellite in space at each of the locations on the arc. As such, for example, having located the C-band Galaxy 14 satellite, the receiver also knew where the Ku-band AMC 21 satellite was. In that C-band

transponders are a lot easier to find, locating Ku-band satellites with a C-band dish involves a lot less head-banging than would be the case for a dedicated Ku-band dish.

A traditional satellite dish with a feed horn that receives both C- and Ku-band signals sent the two feeds to its receiver using separate coaxial cables. The 4DTV receiver that was orphaned in favor of free-to-air had two input jacks, one for C-band and one for Ku-band. A free-to-air receiver only has one input as a rule, and the DMX 741 feed horn we used can be configured to send its signals down a single coaxial cable. A free-to-air receiver differentiates between C- and Ku-band signals in two ways:

1. C-band signals use an IF of 5.150 megahertz. Ku-band signals use an IF of 10.750 megahertz.

2. The 22 kilohertz control signal generated by your receiver should be off for C-band transponders, and on for Ku-band transponders — it controls a switch in the feed horn.

Each entry in the list of satellites maintained by your receiver — and there will be one entry each for C- and Ku-band satellites — can be configured for the appropriate IF and 22 kilohertz control signal setting. Most receivers default to the correct settings for Ku-band. If in performing a blind scan you see Ku-band content when you expect to see channels from C-band, you’ve set one or both of the foregoing incorrectly.

The only catch in using our old C-band dish to receive free-to-air television is that it can only track most of the the arc. This didn’t turn out to be as much of an issue as it might seem, as there’s almost nothing of interest on C-band east of its upper limit. This may serve to explain why this article has discussed both C- and Ku-band dishes. We use a Ku-band dish to receive content in the eastern end of the arc.

In the event that you find yourself in a similar situation — that is, having to connect your receiver to multiple dishes — you’ll probably want to locate a DiSEqC switch. Costing about ten dollars — and often included free with higher-end satellite receivers — these devices will allow you to connect multiple antennas to a single receiver input. Your receiver’s DiSEqC control section can be configured to switch in the appropriate dish for whichever satellite you select, such that once the whole works is wired up, no one need know how diabolically complicated it really is.

CHOOSING A RECEIVER

Free to air satellite television receivers are wonders of technology, marvels of human ingenuity and masterpieces of consumer electronics... with a few issues. In fact, most of them appear to have been designed quickly and made cheap. We evaluated several of them, and left the experience unimpressed.

All the receivers we tried received satellite television, and to their credit, they did so fairly well. It would be a poor excuse for a receiver indeed if it couldn’t. However, a workable satellite receiver needs to do somewhat more than this.

Here are some of the considerations you should keep in mind when you’re choosing a receiver:

• Initial setup: Once you have your satellite dish installed, you’ll need to locate each of the satellites you’re interested in and store their locations somewhere — we’ll get to the exact nature of “somewhere” in a moment. As you might imagine, this can be a bit tricky. Some receivers are fiendishly clever at doing so. You should look for one that can perform a “blind scan” at the very least — a systematic survey of all the possible transponders, polarity settings and frequencies for whatever satellite it’s pointed at.

• Channel management: A satellite receiver needs to manage the enormous volume of free-to-air satellite channels — and do so in a way that doesn’t require that you engage in half an hour of differential calculus to select a program to watch. Typically, it will present you with a menu of satellite feeds, and having selected one, will move your satellite dish and tune in the correct transponder. Some of the receivers we looked at had limited channel lists, and a few of them didn’t automatically position and configure their respective antennas.

• HD reception: It’s a really good idea to buy a free-to-air satellite receiver that can handle HD content, even if you don’t care if what you watch is in high definition. There’s a significant amount of free-to-air television that’s only available in HD. More to the point, there are numerous standard definition channels which use Dolby AC3 sound, which is something an HD receiver typically knows how to decode and a standard definition receiver usually can’t.

• Integral PVR: Most of the newer free-to-air receivers include most of a personal video recorder. Specifically, they have all the logic to record the programs you’d like to time-shift or keep for posterity. As a rule, all they lack is a hard drive to actually record to. Plug a USB hard drive into such a receiver — or even a fairly capacious USB Flash drive — and you’ll be ready to record. Make sure that your putative receiver’s software includes a timer section to change satellites and start its PVR.

• Electronic program guide: Many free-to-air stations include electronic program guide, or EPG, information in their data streams. A suitable receiver can present this information to you as an on-screen guide so you can scope out their upcoming programs.

• Networking: Some free-to-air satellite receivers include Ethernet connectors or integral WiFi to allow them to send digital video all over your house. This strikes me as more technology than I want to know about, but should you feel otherwise, pay attention to the details of your receiver’s networking. Some of them require external modules — available for some additional cash — to make this happen.

• UL or CSA listing: I can’t recall the last time I encountered a bit of consumer electronics that didn’t bear the comforting presence of a UL or CSA logo. At least, I couldn’t recall it until we went shopping for a free-to-air satellite receiver. All but one of the receivers we looked at lacked any sort of meaningful certification. Having Underwriters Laboratories or the Canadian Standards Association certify a box that’s intended to be plugged in promises that someone in a white coat with a better than high school education has checked out the device in question and made reasonably sure it’s unlikely to set fire to your digs when you’re not looking.

None of the receivers we’ve encountered would qualify as being particularly impressive. If you’re

familiar with the more mainstream satellite receivers used to receive DSS or 4DTV, you’re likely to find the best of the available FTA boxes somewhat funky and awkward to use by comparison. This is not to say that they can’t be made to work — you should keep in mind that most of them exhibit a few rough edges.

Our first free-to-air receiver was a Conaxsat Nano 2, which was agreeably small and kind of cute, as these things go. It lacked the aforementioned electrical certification, and its operating system was somewhat difficult to work with. It couldn’t handle HD content or anything with AC3 sound.

After a while, frustration sent us out for further shopping, and the Nano was replaced by a much larger and slightly more expensive SonicView HD8000 receiver, illustrated at the beginning of this section. This one is CSA approved, and it supports all the toys for HD reception. It’s arguably not perfect either — its manual is incomplete and difficult to follow at times, its USALS support is somewhat dodgy and on rare occasions it goes into vapor lock and decides that everything in the sky is a scrambled signal, requiring that the receiver be switched off and then on again. It uses a fan to cool its internal workings, which probably means it will outlive lesser receivers, but the fan is decidedly audible. It sucks back a substantial amount of power in standby mode — it offers a rear-mounted mechanical switch to completely power it down.

On the subject of electrical certification, I should note that while we ultimately found a receiver with a CSA logo painted on it, the GBOX V3000 positioner mentioned earlier that allows it to position our C-band dish doesn’t appear to be either UL or CSA listed. We use a power bar with a mechanical switch to power both devices down when they’re not in use.

A BRIEF WORD ABOUT POSITIONING MOTORS

The positioning motors used to move a Ku-band satellite dish are complex bits of technology and lots of plastic gears. Some of them work better than others.

The most common motor as I write this is the HH90 by STAB, an Italian manufacturer. Beautifully made and inarguably clever inside, these things are probably not the ideal choice if you’re wiring up a free-to-air satellite system all by yourself. Everything the motor does is handled by DiSEqC commands. This includes resetting it back to its default factory settings, should it lose its mind and become confused. Unfortunately, few free-to-air receivers know how to send this command, or some of the others that are required to correctly configure the motor.

There’s an external DiSEqC controller available to run STAB’s motors, and serious satellite television installers no doubt have them. You probably don’t.

We ultimately abandoned a hopelessly confused STAB HH90 for a DG-280 motor, another product from Sadoun Satellite. The DG-280 is larger than the HH90 — it can accomodate a larger-diameter mounting pole — and it includes manual positioning buttons built into the motor casing. Its buttons can also be used to reset the motor’s internal logic, should it become confused.

Needless to say, our effectively un-resettable STAB motor needed resetting, while the easily resettable DG-280 never did.

There are two potential issues inherent in the DG-280 motor:

1. Its manual positioning buttons make it vulnerable to tampering. This hasn’t proven to be an issue for us, as none of the local bears can get their paws into the space behind the dish.

2. The mounting tube for the DG-280 seems to ship with its bolts too loose, allowing the tube to move once the motor has stopped, as was touched on earlier in this article. The manual for the motor discusses how to tighten them. This procedure is somewhat exacting, in that tightening the bolts excessively will cause the motor’s internal mechanism to bind, and prevent it from moving at all.

THE DARK SECRETS OF SATELLITE RETAILERS

The retailers that sell free-to-air satellite equipment — or at least, the ones of our experience — proved to be a remarkable industry. With a few exceptions, they were the most extreme collection of flakes, idiots and genuine crooks ever to create a web page and accept payment by Visa.

It may well be the case that you’ll luck out to a greater degree than we did at first, and find a source of the equipment needed to receive free-to-air satellite television that speaks English, answers their phones and doesn’t treat its customers like the government at tax time. To be sure, you’d have a hard time finding one that was worse than the turkeys we encountered. I heartily recommend the dealers listed at the end of this article — I just wish we’d bumped into them a bit sooner.

This shouldn’t dissuade you from considering free-to-air satellite television. It arguably should make you really observant before you crush your plastic.

If you Google for “free-to-air” or “FTA,” you’ll likely find enough links to pages selling this technology to stun a medium-size Indian elephant. Click on a few of them and you’ll almost certainly experience web pages that could cause bacteria to mutate. While it’s unquestionably the case that people who can’t create attractive web pages aren’t of necessity all running funky businesses, it’s still a good idea to stay away from the ones who can’t spell “satellite” correctly.

On the assumption that business with bad web pages can still afford good lawyers, this article won’t mention any of the really bad satellite retailers we dealt with by name.

Among the issues we encountered were:

Bait and switch: The first free-to-air receiver we bought was something of an adventure. We found one we liked the look of and we encountered no end of on-line retailers who claimed to have it in stock. Providing them with a credit card number to pay for the beast invariably generated an e-mail message to the effect that it was unavailable, and offering us an alternate selection at twice the price.

Your call is very important to us: Few of the free-to-air satellite retailers we tried to do business

with actually deigned to answer their phones. It’s disturbing when the employees of a shop won’t speak to you even when you’re hot to give them money. The better ones had endless music on hold or a sound bite that assured us that our call was in “priority sequence” — quite a few of their competitors’ phones were answered with by sound bite that said that their mailboxes were full, and then hung up.

Your e-mail is also very important to us: The retailers who didn’t answer their phones didn’t answer their e-mail either, for the most part.

A brief delay: All the on-line retailers promised to ship whatever we bought immediately. This turned out to be immediately after they got around to it, an interval that occupied a week to ten days in a few cases. In the sole instance of our being able to contact the retailer in question by e-mail to inquire after our stuff, we were told that the delay was to verify our credit card information — puzzling, this, both as there are few places on earth where credit card verifications takes more than thirty seconds, and because we’d paid for the order in question with a confirmed PayPal account, rather than using plastic.

Free shipping costs $27.95: Most of the free-to-air satellite retailers we bumped into offered free shipping. Few of them actually shipped anything for free. Having placed orders with them, they e-mailed us a few days later to ask for permission to charge us for shipping. The shipping costs tended to be substantial.

Time zones are for losers: One of the less disreputable-looking satellite retailers on the west coast, from whom we bought a receiver, called us just after 3:00pm to confirm our order. We can hardly complain about the verification call, as staff members from Alchemy Mindworks call our customers to confirm orders for our products as well. The catch was that it was just after 3:00pm Pacific time, or right in the middle of dinner out east. Having verified that I was me, their salesperson then got into some nuclear up-selling — for things we couldn’t have found a use for with a search party and a GPS receiver — and he just wouldn’t take “crawl off and die” for an answer.

Cash rules: Because we’re located way north of civilization, almost everything we needed was bought on line — torturously, frustratingly and grotesquely slowly, on line. The one exception was a Ku-band satellite dish, which came from an actual store-based retailer during one of our infrequent forays to the south. It was an interesting little shop, easily as unprepossessing as its on-line presence had suggested. The shop didn’t stock anything like what the web page suggested it did, but it did have an unusual feature that wasn’t mentioned on line. The proprietor would only accept payment for satellite equipment in cash, the prominent Visa and MasterCard logos in his window not withstanding. At first this looked like a taste of the fabled underground economy that we’ve heard so much about with the recent increases in our sales taxes, but his cash prices turned out to be essentially identical to the prices he charged on line, which included sales tax for the benefit of anyone from the government who happened by. An unscheduled visit to a nearby ATM was called for.

Happily, we did encounter some exceptions to all the foregoing skullduggery and obfuscation. Among them, Sadoun Satellite Sales in Columbus Ohio, which has turned up earlier in this article, maintains a readable web page — most users will be able to look at it for more than thirty seconds without experiencing any facial charring — and working telephones with live, English-speaking

entities to answer them.

Sadoun’s prices will seem a bit high, and their shipping charges look decidedly brutal compared to many other on-line retailers of free-to-air satellite technology. This is something of an optical illusion, however, in that most of Sadoun’s competitors — at least, the ones that we got involved with — didn’t wind up selling the toys at their web pages and thereafter shipping them for anything like the prices they claimed.

It must also be said of Sadoun that they were singularly knowledgeable about free-to-air satellite hardware. Their web page offers a rich palette of helpful documents, some of them illustrated with videos. A few of them have turned up elsewhere at this page. The technical support department at Sadoun — one Bill Sadoun, who might well be the owner of the business — actually returned our calls on several occasions, and had clearly forgotten more about satellite television than all the other retailers we dealt with combined had ever known.

In fairness, we did experience a few retail meltdowns in our dealing with Sadoun, most notably two shipments with incorrect addresses which saw my friend Dave spending most of a morning at the UPS store in Niagara Falls while our errant toys were located. Sadoun subsequently refunded the shipping charges for them to make amends.

ARGH, ME HEARTIES

This article has alluded to the somewhat darker side of free-to-air television, without getting too deeply into it. It’s not going to get too deeply into it now, either.

Commercial DSS satellite television, such as DirecTV, Dish Network, Bell ExpressVu and Shaw Direct, uses the same satellites, the same frequencies and almost the same hardware as free-to-air television. The important distinction between the two is that DSS is scrambled, such that you’d need to beat up your credit card to watch it.

The nasty little secret of free-to-air satellite television is that the hardware required to receive and view it can also be used to pirate DSS satellite television. I mention this not to encourage anyone to do so. Unless you’ve been dead for several months, you’ll unquestionably notice that just about everyone who wants to sell you free-to-air satellite equipment will also be happy to provide you with everything you need to steal scrambled commercial content.

The proprietary receivers provided by DSS satellite television companies include built-in descrambling technology, which will allow their purveyors to switch on the content you pay for. The catch in all this is that the cryptography these receivers use is decidedly ancient, dating back well into the twentieth century. In the intervening decades, hackers have become sufficiently adept at breaking these things to render them extremely porous.

A free-to-air receiver is really a computer running dedicated software to manage your favorite channels, uncompress incoming video and display a few menus. It didn’t take the pirates long to appreciate that the computer in a free-to-air receiver could be reprogrammed to defeat the

scrambling used in DSS content.

A brief pontification upon half-inching commercial satellite television follows. Read it carefully if you find yourself to be in need of sleep.

I don’t pirate commercial satellite television, and I’d urge you not to do so either. I have a number of reasons for not doing so, perhaps the most compelling of them being that I create intellectual property for a living, and I undertake no small degree of effort to prevent cybercretins from stealing it. I find myself unable to work up a sufficient level of hypocrisy to steal someone else’s stuff, even if they have a lot more money than I do.

Here are a few more concrete reasons for not embracing video piracy:

Stealing satellite television is odious and slimy: Without question, some of the world’s satellite television companies are greasy, manipulative uber-corporations that expend more effort figuring out how to extract money from their customers than many third-world nations can bring to bear upon the problem of growing food. They have coercive billing practices, deceptive marketing strategies and pricing structures that have a great deal more to do with what the market will bear than they do with the value of the products they’re selling.

This is a compelling reason to avoid doing business with them. It’s not a license to behave even more disreputably than they do.

Consider the analogy of buying a car. If the grunt selling the car you’re after turns out to want way more than you feel it’s worth, you’d be entirely justified in leaving without buying the car. You wouldn’t be justified in sneaking back after he’s gone to bed and driving off with it.

I’m sure I have a reasonable selection of character flaws — being a thief isn’t one of them.

You might also consider that if commercial satellite television companies start seeing their quarterly statements seriously impacted by piracy, they’re unlikely to spend a lot of bandwidth considering that their prices are too extreme. They’re going to ratchet them up and nail their customers — probably some of your friends among them — even harder.

Satellite providers change keys: While the encryption used by DSS satellite receivers is embarrassingly primitive by contemporary standards, it’s not without a few rabbits left in its hat. The dark trolls that run the technology behind satellite television can select alternate encryption keys in software if they’re in a funny mood. This won’t affect legitimate receivers, but it will shut down hacked receivers for a while, ‘til their owners come up with a new set of keys. From time to time, the satellite companies will issue their real customers with new “smart” cards to plug into their receivers, to freshen up their encryption.

While encryption key swaps probably just amuse the hackers who spend their mean little lives cracking these things, they will cause you to miss your favorite shows at random intervals. I’d imagine this could become quite infuriating in time.

Satellite television companies can hire rabid lawyers: One of the observations to be drawn from

the questionable behavior of a number of record companies and film studios over the past decade — specifically, their practice of extorting money from putative pirates under the threat of unaffordable legal action should they decline to locate their respective checkbooks — is that a surprising number of people don’t understand how civil law works.

If a large company with deep pockets decides to involve you in a legal action, you’ll need to hire an attorney to defend yourself. Your costs will be five figures just to show up, not including whatever it takes to rent a nice suit. The bill will get a lot thicker if you actually lose. Your legal expenses won’t go away if you win.

This is why record companies have been so successful at squeezing money from alleged music thieves. Given the choice between parting with five thousand dollars to settle one of these things or fifty thousand dollars and counting to put it before a judge — typically an east-Texas judge who hasn’t found in favor of a defendant in a civil action since the repeal of prohibition — even innocent victims of these actions typically pay up and leave.

Satellite television is finding itself increasing under attack from more widely available cable television, television streamed over the Internet and television on DVDs. Like the record companies before them, the CEOs of the satellite companies appear much more readily disposed to blame the mushrooms growing in their bottom lines on pirates than on their own high prices and questionable business practices. From time to time, they’ve been known to “get tough” with the imagined agents of their woes.

In an article published on March 15, 2009, the Toronto Star described Bell ExpressVu as threatening legal action against end users whom it had decided were stealing its content. According to the article, Bell identified them as anyone who had purchased a free-to-air satellite receiver and had subscribed to one of several web pages that offered cracked keys capable of decrypting Bell’s content. The alleged pirates were given the option of paying a $1000 settlement and surrendering their receivers, or going to court.

The article in The Star didn’t state how many users Bell had targeted, or how many of them had settled out of court. It also didn’t reveal how Bell had tracked the sales of receivers or the subscriptions to key sites.

DirecTV, south of the border for us, appears to have taken similar legal actions against alleged pirates, albeit with a number of notable setbacks.

In order to pirate DSS signals, you’ll need to purchase cracked keys from someone — which is to say that you’ll have to provide a faceless hacker in Delaware with your credit card number or your PayPal account details. If one of the satellite television companies finally finds the right judge and manages to seize the records of your hacker of choice, they’ll eventually uncover a paper trail back to you.

This doesn’t strike me as worth the pain just to watch bad movies on HBO.

I wouldn’t have mentioned using free-to-air satellite receivers to pirate DSS content at all, save that if you go shopping for some of the toys discussed in this article, you’ll likely find yourself drawn to

the dark side on your first click. Virtually all the web pages of the free-to-air satellite retailers we checked out included stern pronouncements about their ill-regard for anything associated with video piracy. This not withstanding, many of them offered a complete range of dishes and LNBFs specifically intended for stealing DSS.

In that the dish and LNBF you’ll need to receive free-to-air signals differ slightly from the ones that would be used to steal DSS content, it’s worth knowing the difference.

You’ll recall the discussion of LNBF polarity earlier in this article. A linear free-to-air LNBF supports vertical and horizontal polarity. A DSS LNBF supports circular polarity. You can interchange these devices to some extent, but with considerable signal loss, and hence a degraded picture.

Make sure you buy a linear free-to-air LNBF. Most of them have an intermediate frequency, or IF, of 10.750 megahertz. This is the frequency that they convert received microwaves to so they can be sent through a coaxial cable to your receiver. Circular polarity LNBFs use a variety of IF frequencies, but that’s not one of them.

LNBFs are available with single feeds and with multiple feeds. If you’re interested in receiving free-to-air satellite television, a single-feed LNBF is all you’ll need.

Because the commercial satellite companies want to offer more content than can be squeezed onto a single satellite, they typically park several satellites adjacent to each other and provide their subscribers with elliptical dishes, or larger round dishes, upon which can be fixed multiple LNBFs to receive signals from multiple satellites. Such a dish is illustrated above. If you’re shopping for a free-to-air dish, you don’t need anything this complicated... or expensive... or potentially litigious. A round 36-inch steel dish will do.

As an aside, you’ll often find dishes with the regalia of one of the DSS satellite companies painted on them available from satellite retailers. As a rule, these aren’t a worthwhile substitute for a dedicated free-to-air dish. They’re typically smaller than they should be, and they lack the hardware to attach them to a positioning motor. Finally, it’s arguably unwise to turn the visible portion of your satellite television receiver into lawyer bait for no good reason.

THE RETURN OF 4DTV

The satellite television to be discussed in this next section isn’t actually free, and purists will probably suggest that as such, it doesn’t really belong in this article. Purists are a nuisance, for the most part...

As was noted near the beginning of this page, for a very long time, television viewers with reasonable eye-hand coordination and enough real estate to erect a full-size satellite dish could access 4DTV satellite programming. 4DTV, while a paid-for service like the more common DSS

satellite services, allowed most of its programming to be bought more or less a la carte, or one channel at a time.

In the closing months of 2010, it came to pass that National Programming Service, the primary 4DTV subscription provider, announced its plans to discontinue 4DTV. It looked like 4DTV would be video history by the end of the year. Cue ominous music.

In fact, 4DTV evolved rather than died. Satellite Receivers Limited of Green Bay, Wisconsin created its own species of 4DTV. It got the whole works to behave with traditional 4DTV receivers... albeit with some initial technical issues and no small amount of screaming in the first few days after the system went on line. It put all its programming on a single, easy-to-access C-band satellite. It installed an on-line payment system, allowing 4DTV programming to be purchased instantly, and in increments as small as a single month.

The new incarnation of 4DTV isn’t quite as robust as its ancestor, as of this writing — while it offers a respectable selection of programming, several program providers, most notably HBO, have declined to be included in its content list. Having lost interest in all-you-can-eat movie channels years ago, I’ve not missed HBO.

4DTV makes a cool adjunct to FTA satellite television, as it will let you round out your selection of content with a few paid-for channels that don’t exist free-to-air, without having to spring for a bulging slate of television you’ll never watch, as would be the case for DSS satellite.

Say what you will about the preponderance of monsters in rubber suits on SyFy Channel — you’ll miss them when they’re gone.

The current 4DTV content resides on what 4DTV receivers refer to as satellite W5 and FTA receivers think of as AMC 18, at 105° west. If you visit the LyngSat page for this satellite, you’ll find a lot of C-band content there labeled “HITS Quantum” — this is the 4DTV programming. A 4DTV receiver can be coerced into sharing a C-band satellite dish with an FTA receiver and its dish positioner.

You can persuade a 4DTV receiver to cohabit the sky with an existing FTA system in one of two ways. The first and slightly cheaper approach is to connect the input of your 4DTV receiver to the IF OUT or FEED THRU connector of your FTA receiver. This will pass the signal from your C-band dish through your FTA receiver to your 4DTV receiver, which will happily receive programming as long as your satellite dish is pointing to 105° west. The catch in doing this is that most FTA receivers disable their feed-through jacks when they’re powered up, meaning that you can only have one receiver powered at a time.

A slightly more expensive solution — by several dollars — is to install a satellite television high-

frequency splitter between the end of the cable from your dish and your by now frighteningly large collection of satellite television hardware. This will let both receivers listen to the sky simultaneously. You’ll want to make sure to leave your satellite dish pointing to AMC 18 at 105° west when it’s not otherwise occupied, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment.

The splitter used to divvy up your satellite signal will entail a bit of attention — a conventional cable television splitter won’t cut it. A suitable splitter needs to deal with at least 2400 megahertz, and it needs to allow DC to pass through one of its output connectors, such that only one receiver can power the LNBF at your dish. We used a Sadoun Satellite S-8231D splitter, which cost all of three dollars.

Somewhat more involved than wiring a 4DTV receiver into your existing free-to-air satellite system will be finding a 4DTV receiver in the first place. These things are a bit obscure.

The simplest and by far the least expensive device capable of receiving 4DTV satellite television is a DSR-410 receiver, available from Skyvision. Their web page can be found at the end of this article. The DSR-410s sold by Skyvision are refurbished, but at about a hundred and thirty dollars as of this writing, they’re agreeably cheap. They’re also a lot less scary than the alternative.

Traditional 4DTV was typically received using one of three devices — a DSR-920 or a DSR-922 receiver, as illustrated at the beginning of this section, or a DSR-905 “sidecar,” which would allow some conventional satellite receivers to receive and subscribe to 4DTV content. We’re not going to get too involved with the latter device.

Unless you currently own one of these receivers, or you’re by nature brave, foolhardy or really good with tools, you might want to skip the next bit.

The DSR-920 and DSR-922 receivers are somewhat large and pretty expensive if you can find a genuinely working one — plan on parting with about five hundred dollars — but they’re a peach to use. They have robust, bulletproof operating systems, uncompromising picture and sound quality and a lot of shelf presence. They also make attractive digital clocks when they’re not in use.

The catch to these devices is that they’re so ancient as to predate the development of flash computer memory. Each receiver has a unique address number to allow it to subscribe to 4DTV content, which is stored in a block of conventional volatile memory that’s kept alive by a lithium battery. If the contents of this memory are lost, the receiver will become a permanent and unrecoverable brick.

The lithium batteries installed in these things had a useful working life of five years or so — back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when these receivers were built. Needless to say, any such receiver with its original battery will have lost its mind years ago.

To further complicate this issue, the original lithium batteries in the DSR-920 and DSR-922 receivers were hard-wired into their circuitry, and they were kind of cheap and nasty as batteries go. Shortly after they died, they usually began leaking toxic chemicals over their surrounding components, dooming their parent receivers as e-waste.

The lithium batteries in 4DTV receivers can be replaced, and while the procedure for doing so is really quite frightening, a considerable number of these receivers are still alive and watching the skies — happily, including ours.

The moral of this tale of woe and industrial by-products is that you really want to see a prospective DSR-920 or DSR-922 receiver working and receiving 4DTV content before you crush your plastic to own it. You should also peek through the slots in the top of its case to make sure its lithium battery doesn’t resemble the one in the first few photographs at the foregoing link. The original batteries were usually red, while the most common replacements are purple and green.

This is unquestionably not something you want to buy on eBay.

Should you ultimately decide to use a DSR-920 or DSR-922 receiver to watch 4DTV, you will probably have to jump through a few hoops to disconnect it from the original 4DTV data stream — which no longer exists — and introduce it to the current one. There’s a detailed discussion of this procedure at the Satellite Receivers Limited web page, listed at the end of this article.

Once you get a 4DTV receiver up and working, you should be able to point your C-band satellite dish to 105° west and see some activity. Tune your 4DTV receiver to channel 216 and you should see an on-screen message to the effect that you haven’t subscribed to the programming in question. The programming in question on channel 216 is the Style Channel, as of this writing, which may not be the very first thing you want to subscribe to.

If you select a 4DTV channel of 900 or higher, you should find yourself listing to some non-scrambled satellite radio stations.

Visit the Satellite Receivers Limited web page, listed at the end of this article, and introduce yourself to the WebSAMS system therein to subscribe to the 4DTV channels you like the look of. It should be noted that WebSAMS is not the most polished web-based payment system in the known universe, and you might be somewhat concerned about providing it with your credit card. Its rough edges not withstanding, we’ve used it for some while as of this writing, with no ill effects.

Unlike free-to-air satellite television, 4DTV includes an integrated, comprehensive on-screen program guide. You’ll need to subscribe to the guide through WebSAMs, although there’s no cost for doing so. In order to allow your receiver to download the guide, you should select any channel with 4DTV content and leave your receiver there when you’re not otherwise watching the beast. You’ll need to leave your satellite dish pointed to 105° west, as well.

It can take several hours for the 4DTV guide to completely download and populate. Thereafter, the guide will periodically top itself up with fresh program listings. 4DTV receivers expect to be left plugged in and powered up permanently, such that they can receive guide updates when the mood strikes them. While you can switch off a DSR-920 or DSR-922 receiver when it’s not in use, doing so actually just shuts down the front panel light show. The receiver itself will stay powered up, and

your guide will stay up to date.

DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL

Free to air satellite television arguably isn’t for the faint of heart, or for the flat of posterior. It lacks access to premium content, a situation that’s unlikely to change any time soon. It requires a lot more work of its faithful couch potatoes than DSS satellite, even if your commercial content provider typically keeps you on hold for hours.

This said, it’s kind of fun to meddle with, rewarding when you get it working and a powerful weapon in the arsenal against the sucking sound your credit card makes every month.

It’s comforting to appreciate that confronted with the unenviable choice between cable and DSS satellite, you can opt for neither and still not have to repair to the late middle ages.

If you can operate a few hand tools, follow simple instructions in bad English and use a calculator, you can almost certainly get one of these things working. Should you choose instead to hire a professional installer, you’ll still save money over what DSS satellite would have cost you, albeit not quite as soon. As of this writing, you’ll be able to watch The Simpsons on the FOX affiliate in the Caribbean either way.

Some useful web pages:

Sadoun Satellite Sales: http://www.sadoun.comSatellite Guys Content List: http://www.satelliteguys.us/thelist/LyngSat: http://www.lyngsat.comWS International: http://www.wsidigital.comGalaxy Marketing: http://www.galaxy-marketing.comSatellite Receivers Limited: http://www.programming-center.netSkyvision: http://www.skyvision.com

Be sure to check out the Satellite Guys' on-line forums. They offer buckets of information about installing your toys, and help with finding content.

The Free Direct Broadcasting Satellite Network has announced an upcoming slate of about twenty dedicated free-to-air channels, and other related content. While it's not in the sky as of this writing, you might want to check out their page from time to time to see how they're progressing.

The various television screen captures that appear at this page are provided for illustration only, and do not represent a business relationship of any kind between us and the content providers they represent.

—Steven William RimmerIf you have comments about this page, please send us some e-mail.