What Happened To Those Huge Satellite Dishes?

Remember when tons of people had those big C-band satellite dishes in their yards? Whatever happened to those, and why were they so large?

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[PlanetEleethal]

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

[ollllj]

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

[infinityryvus]

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

[jackabug]

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

[terrycunningham]

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

[michaelparks]

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

[ADCar]

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

[johnbod]

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

[giuliani]

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

[RaDeus]

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

[CarputingYT]

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

[jnucci]

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

[leonardneamtu_]

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

[ddmarty]

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

[dwave]

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

[ltmadinsane]

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

[joeycameron]

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

[calessel]

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

[sublimationman]

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

[MrChristianDT]

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