Late 80s/Early 90s Satellite TV Hey Days

[Guest]

Does anyone remember the hey days of satellite TV during the late 80s/early 90s when you could get yourself a 1m dish and turn it around scanning the skys eavesdropping on all kinds of TV?

--No, not just porrn PP

I remember eavesdropping on all kinds of stuff including a selection of Euro music channels like Viva Germany and MCM France and of course TV1000/Filmnet/TV3 from Sweden (of which TV1000/Filmnet uplinked hard corn porn for the 'Swedish audience' from London)

With the introduction of digital TV streams and complex scrambling just seems you're tied to your sat TV operator these days and it kind of takes the fun out of a hobby/interest :/

[lxskllr]

I used to do something similar with shortwave radio, but not TV. It was fun listening to broadcasts from around the world :^)

[Guest]

Crikey, guess that's alll DAB now?

I get all my radio stations through sat now but I think most are encrypted anyway :/

[EricHill78]

I used to do something similar with shortwave radio, but not TV. It was fun listening to broadcasts from around the world :^)

I had a shortwave radio as well. A grundig Satelit 500. I loved tuning in different stations around the world.

[lxskllr]

Crikey, guess that's alll DAB now?

I get all my radio stations through sat now but I think most are encrypted anyway :/

I dunno, I haven't had a working set in awhile. I listen to stuff online now. It's super cool cause there's a micro niche for anything you might like, but it takes a lot of the fun out of the pot luck aspect of shortwave. I'd just creep down the dial, and listen to different things that caught my interest. I might not even know wth they were saying, but it was neat hearing stuff from around the world :^)

[Guest]

Yeah, that was the excitement for me with satellite...

[justintempler]

I used to have an 11 foot dish on a rear deck balcony. I had it mounted to a 4 ½" pipe bolted to a the bottom of a 55 gallon steel drum filled with sand. I had some strange neighbor lady that thought I was using it to spy on her.

The HBO stuff was already scrambled but there was still a lot of free stuff. All the syndicated programming was being fed to TV stations in the clear, The Network feeds were still in the clear. A lot of Canadian programming CBC (Street Legal was my favorite show, hockey games). I also learned a lot of Spanish watching XEW-TV, XHGC-TV out of Mexico. I also got to watch all the raw news feeds during the 1st Gulf War, plus a lot of feeds had subcarrier audio with radio stations. It was an interesting time.

[CoderGuy]

I used to have an 11 foot dish on a rear deck balcony. I had it mounted to a 4 ½" pipe bolted to a the bottom of a 55 gallon steel drum filled with sand. I had some strange neighbor lady that thought I was using it to spy on her.

The HBO stuff was already scrambled but there was still a lot of free stuff. All the syndicated programming was being fed to TV stations in the clear, The Network feeds were still in the clear. A lot of Canadian programming CBC (Street Legal was my favorite show, hockey games). I also learned a lot of Spanish watching XEW-TV, XHGC-TV out of Mexico. I also got to watch all the raw news feeds during the 1st Gulf War, plus a lot of feeds had subcarrier audio with radio stations. It was an interesting time.

I too had this this type of setup. It was in 82 and things were not scrambled yet. We used to enjoy watching the live news feeds were you would see them chatting to each other. We used to watch the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and when it went to a commercial we would watch him (Carson) pull out his ashtray and light up while he and his guests had a drink and chatted.

We still had it in 85 and were watching a live newsfeed when we saw the story break about Ricky Nelson and watched the live footage as they panned around the wreckage. Interesting times.

[AllanH]

Remember vividly porn on Swedish TV1000 those days, it was pretty cool and avantgarde at time: double anals and everything, now that kind of stuff is mainstream and everybody does it.