my uncle Martin has been trying to contact his home planet for decades ....this might help ,thanks!

For the mount on the roof, sand bags might be more efficient. Less likely to get bucked off of the frame rather than the concrete blocks.

I had no idea this was even still possible! I thought that the concept of picking up random free satellite feeds died in the 90s! Just assumed everything was encrypted nowadays. This is amazing!

I bet this guy's neighbors love him lmao

Thats a old V-Sat that hughes used in many commercial business. I traveled the 11 western states installing them in gas stations, grocery stores, tire franchises,edward jones, you name it 20-25 years ago.Thats the smaller dish .75 also came in 1.2 and 1.8 meter sizes depending on bird commisioning to, and state installing in. The IDU (receiver) was expanable with plc cards, or even a mpeg card back then. Used a laptop with dos software to input MSB /LSB from the NOC to the IDU via serial and the co-ax connector under the cap on the tx radio was used with a volt meter to tune. Once locked onto the right bird and transponder , the lower the voltage out of that connector the better the signal. Dont forget to put some rubber pad under the non pen mount, and some block for ballast weight.

25 years ago the store I worked at had a dish like that for credit card processing I believe

That mount is what we call a non-penetration mount. You can put some cinderblocks or bricks in the corner to hold it down, no drilling or holes requried.

I used to install those at gas stations and big box stores. I quit getting contracts because I wouldn't let a 16 year old Circuit City employee look through my bag and toolbox for stolen items. Then they went out of business 5 months later.

I would have killed to have this when I was a kid. Go up on the roof and easter egg hunt for tv stations around the world.

This brought back memories of what I was doing back in the 1980s in the UK. Before satellite TV there were lots of feeds to cable networks, nothing encoded. I remember watching an open feed from the USA presidential elections that was sending interviews to the UK but was on 24/7 and people were deciding where they were going to eat and drink and having personal conversations. I also watched links from outside broadcasts where they were brutally honest about the loonies they were interviewing before the actual broadcast. I remember one hilarious one where an average man had bought a house and decided to dig a basement, the house fell down into the hole he dug out, the interviewer was brutal about him until the actual interview. Also could intercept WWE wrestling being sent over for recording and transmission on Sky when it was cable only. Sadly digital has put an end to all this. 1.8 meter dish with variable polarisation and a motor to rotate it aligned to the Clarke belt. I was a pioneer of satellite reception in the UK in 1984/5. I ended up with a vast amount of receivers and decoders, even ones that worked off a computer. It was great fun at the time as UK TV was boring and Swedish and Dutch TV had naked women!

You can bypass the transmit part of that setup, and just hook your receiver up to the LNB (the smaller rectangular box hooked up to the top part of the diplexer connected to the feedhorn). Your receiver was struggling to provide enough power for the transmitter (the larger box with the fins on it) AND the LNB, and you probably shouldn't be transmitting anyway... The diplexer separates the higher frequency transmit signal (in the 14 GHz band) coming out of the transmitter from the lower frequency receive signal coming from the satellite (in the 12 GHz band). It's a nice setup for $6!

The long loopy antenna is a UHF 16 bay folded dipole array. It's vertically polarized and has a circular but very narrow broadcast pattern. I'ts likely tuned for a commercial channel but may work on amateur radio 70cm band. If you know of any hams in the area they might want one of these for a repeater. Regarding the satellite antenna, you can use just the LNBF at the top rather than trying to use the BUC. You can also get dual polarity LNBFs that will likely attach to that feedhorn so you get all the linear channels. The feed horn is matched to the antenna reflector so I would keep it if you are going to do FTA. NOAA sats use a failrly weak signal so you might need a 10' or bigger dish for that. Try that C-band dish you have it might work. Have fun!

Stumbled across your channel last night and couldn't help but subscribe. I love the tinkering aspect of your content, and you're a wonderful presenter.

Towards the end it shows that the signal you were receiving is DVB-S2, which actually surprised me. I always thought you guys in North America were using your own TV standard. I guess you never stop learning xD Watching TV over satellite is afaik the most common way of watching television here in Germany. Almost every second household not only has a TV dish, but actively uses it. We use the Astra 19.2°E Sattelite for TV mostly (in the past Hotbird 13.0°E was also used, but there's barely anything on there these days)

Your car looked like a C&C Tiberian Sun GDI disruptor tank, which is awesome 😁

I used to install those satellite antennas back in 2005. TX-RX 2 watt. Remember there is a 13 degree offset from the satellite to the antenna as you look at it.

Everybody needs to be on a first name basis with a guy like this for when the apocalypse hits

I like watching your channel. I'm envious of what you know how to do with stuff we all throw away.

Every Wal-Mart had these back in the 90s. They uploaded sales data (and such) and downloaded training info (and such) nightly. I worked for another global corp that was REALLY JEALOUS of daily data updates vs weekly or monthly!

consider a drip line when running a cable in from the roof

Yes, that's a NPRM or Non-Penetrating Roof mount. One suggestion: If high wind is coming, get a can of bright orange Krylon and paint the "footprint" of the frame on the roof so if wind moves the mount, you can easily re-aim it. Why would you want to abandon the feedhorn and LNB on the dish? It's probably a higher quality than what you home-made and far more efficient. And, try plugging your receiver into the smaller (top) LNB the one that connects to the bigger unit with the short cable. You might even get a better signal using just the smaller LNB box. The bigger box (with the ribs) is part of the uplink section and useless to you. I'm a news junkie and love "wild feeds" for news and I'd love to find a small dish like this one. Your big antenna that you don't know what it is... It's a 460MHz two-way type antenna. Google "exposed dipole omni antenna" and you'll find something like it. Looks like one I used to have on a tower for 450-470mHz for two-way units and remote pickup for a radio station.

This is the first of what i am guessing is many videos of yours i am going to watch. Thanks for the content.

The antenna on your roof is a 8 bay antenna. Usually installed on a tower leg, most commonly used for uhf repeaters .

@saveitforparts - Referring to timeframe 09:10 I'd recommend pulling some of the cable back out and forming a small loop in the cable just below the hole in the wall, thus preventing water ingress as it runs down the cable. Keep up the good work.

Is it just me or does it sound funny when he says roof

That antenna on the roof with the loops on it is a DB products UHF commercial communications antenna. Looks like an 8 bay. Probably somewhere between 450 and 500 mhz

I love those 2 way satellite dishes They had 29 ghz, 26 ghz, and I think 12 ghz models Hughes Data Systems The ku lnb is a standard 10600 to 12800 You have to just use the receive lnb. Straight from the lnb to the meter I used to have one of those and I gave it away There is a lot of news feeds on other satellites. You have to scan each satellite one at a time 4 times a day Satellite trucks are only on for a shirt time around news hours

Hi! Great find for 6bucks, definetelly keep the LNB, the TX portion can be usefull in the future perhaps for some radar experiments. Anyway, few notes here. GOES is Linearly polarized (and so is the cantenna feedhorn), only NOAA POES, METEOR MN2 and European MetOp satellites that are on low earth orbit are RHCP. Your assumption about the dish geometry was correct, cantenna simply said recieves a "circle" from the focal point outwards and you had a rectangle dish, eg. that means you we're picking up more noise than useful signal which made any GOES Detection impossible. Try it with the BUD prime focus dish, cantenna is a perfect feed for those dishes as they are deeper and so have lower f/D ratio (and so much wider angle from the focal point) which is suitable for cantenna.

I hope you can get all these up and running and then combine all the stations together in the guide and you have endless TV to watch. All for free.

A couple of dishes can double as P2P links. For the wireless radios, you can use the Mikrotik LDF series. There is a model that can be used as an LTE Cat6 CPE.

I love that you go out of your way to discover TV transmissions, and don't have any kind of traditional TV. :)

I have one of the long antennas with the hoops. Came off of one of my radio towers and is around 450mhz for an old 2 way system. I am repurposing it as a GMRS repeater antenna if it cleans up properly. When you do get cband up we still use it downlink audio for FM radio broadcast. It is all encrypted though. FCC just paid to upgrade our main dish because of the whole 5G thing and put in this huge lustworthy dish.

As Photovoltaic sparky, I remove gravel and use some rubber mat stripes (similar to anti vibration mat for washing machine) to protect roof water sealing from being punctured. And a lot of ballast too.

I know this is old but you should put a drip loop in that cable that runs into the side of your house so rain that attaches to it will drip off the bottom and not into your home causing water damage

Driving around with the dish on the car roof must have got some looks.

Awesome video! Thanks for sharing this. I’m a satellite nut myself and this stuff is really fun!

Great stuff! Just reminds as my satellite history when in mid 90's got my first dish and receiver and watched Eurosport and MTV (as they then payed music videos in their channel) 😂 Love your experiences with different satellite information, keep up!

Just a head's up - PBS will be moving to Galaxy 16 Ku band this spring. NPR is already there on the C band. Fun content! Now, what do I do with this old 3 meter dish that's in pieces?

I just hauled a Triex J5 50 foot mast on my 2002 Forester. 20ft sections and a 14ft driveway gate 200 miles through north Cali. Never underestimate a Subaru or the sheer stupidity of their owners.

This is so cool. You've inspired my to get back to tinkering! Thanks!

I would just drive around with that dish on my roof just for the looks from people

You're so smart man! Keep doing your thing

The antenna on the ground is usually FM broadcast multiplex transmitter.

This channel is awesome!!

Would like to mention the reason NBC has no audio is because at the time you were tuned to the old fta NBC mux. Those affiliate NBC feeds had 5.1 audio but as separate stereo audio tracks instead of one big one like normal. So you do Oy get some surround sound audio with only music or vocals only.

Love your channel, you are very inspirational for creativity but a bad influence on our hoarding. Keep up the good work.

10:13 An idea i had in the past was to make a “Radome” (or even transparent acrylic one for stargazing/doing celestial navigation lol) that would drop into the moonroof of a minivan / or just *cut into* the roof of a minivan/commercial van and drop in something similar but *larger*. If I don’t get to it first you could try this!

3:55 that's not Saudi Arabia home shopping network! That's one of Iran's internal state TV channels. The rule of thumb is if the woman wears black hijab, but her face is shown and she's smiling, then it's an Iranian network for Iranians. If the woman wears colorful hijab and tighter clothes, it's still an Iranian network, but for foreigners. You may watch Iranian channels to get familiar with our culture, our cinema, and our art. There are lots of them in foreign languages such as English, Arabic, Spanish, etc. P. S. If there's no woman in TV, it's either Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan.

Back in the mid 2000's I had lots of KU band dishes set up and got lots of great FTA channels. I stopped doing it when lots of channels all at once dropped off.

Use a power injector for your LNB. The antenna on your roof you can't identify is a UHF bay antenna for a repeater. Just found your channel, sorry for the late help ;)

That is the coolest dish I've ever seen

FTA blindscanning is so much fun.

The “unknown” with folded dipoles on your roof is a CommScope DB224 or DB420 depending on the measurement of the dipoles (hard for me to tell by the video) used for business band or amateur radio FM base stations or repeaters.

got this in my recommended, looks neat u can do stuff like this. when i was a kid in belgium we only had a few odd dutch and french channels. my dad got sattelite tv to watch formula one on RTL. Bonus i got as a kid was Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. Stuff we didnt have on cable back then. Only drawback was its only in German ! :D i did learn a new language that way.

That random antenna you got there is for UHF 440/70CM Ham Radio Repeater.

I used to horde dishes and tinker with this stuff for free tv about 15 years ago. Then I realized I could just buy an Android TV box and get everything I wanted for free with the right Kodi builds. The satellite stuff is a fun hobby but not worth the trouble.

I'm glad I found this channel. I want to make videos like this as well. Well done. Good on you.

transporting that dish ontop of a car surely made someone suspicious

I still have a couple of primestar dishes

Was that a nascar race?? I'd just turn on AM 1500 for the audio announcers 😂😂🤙

5:56 - Saudi arabian home shopping network. You hit gold there

The LNB ist the little thing on the top. Your little test device shuts off because you power the buc (transmitter) also. The other problem what you have is the LNB is monoplar and restricted to a little pice of the frequency band. Here in Germany these gas station terminals are round. I've got one and converted it to an normal tv dish. You need an normal ku LNB, cut the Feedhorn off and mount it after the original Feedhorn. Your Antenna is so special that you need the original Feedhorn. You can't use an normal Offset ku band LNB with the original Feedhorn of the LNB. If you need help text me.

That 3ABN is from my area SO IL. I and another guy built the first station. 47 foot dish we feed with sig..

I used to work on those when I worked for LSAT with my dad and we would switch out Choice Hotels so they could do the reservation had to change the lnb and repoint the dish and run a new wire with a new receiver also rewired all the Ford system she should have saw the old technology they were still using in the early 2000

I love the name of your channel. It is my life😁.

That intro is perfect. I agree, passing up on that dish should be illegal! 😂

Should have left it on the car, imagine the reception of local radio lol

the antenna on your roof laying down looks like an fm broadcast antenna

1:00 that is one awesome setup on your car rooftop. Very stormchase-like

the car dish looks to good to take off lol

Hughes net got bought up a long time ago. Dang man that's old as heck

Could imagine the looks you got driving that home....

Good work brother

This brings back memories to 80s and 90s. We (here in Europe and beyond) use to run dishes tapping into pirate stations. Thanks to that we had access to shows that were otherwise completely unobtainable at all. Another thanks to which I learned English too watching foreign channels and learning about things that otherwise I would never gain access to maybe not even today in an era where you go online and ''find everything'' (right). So as few friends hacking into certain signals, radio, TV stations etc. Another thanks to which we managed to pinpoint enemy NATO signals and tap into them too, was a major help fighting against them when they attacked us throughout the whole 90s. Plenty of opportunity and experience with these and tinkering. I am planning to live completely off grid and thinking of using antennas again, solely for Internet. I have nearly everything covered just always been struggling to have great internet offgrid.

Cool stuff! Now I'll be on the look out for these old dishes hekhek

I think that dish looks best mounted on the roof of your car.

goods i like

All this is really cool. I Have Radio Station Authorization in US. I love all this. Your are doing great work. 👍 New subscribe here.

A lot of early satellite Internet used the satellite to beam down "downloaded" data, while the "upload" side worked over an ordinary modem over ordinary phone lines. On the principle that people tend to download more than they upload. I presume it made the satellite and these ground stations much easier to design, without having to collect signals from thousands of transmitters at one. As well, how would you synchronise it so that only one ground station is transmitting at once, per frequency? There's a long delay, in networking terms, in recieving information through the wired Internet, then transmitting it from Hughes's ground station up to the satellite, then down again to the customer. So time slots can't be tightly integrated. And in the other direction you're using a modem and the phone network, also pretty laggy. And just one station going wrong could have flooded the sat with nonsense and killed the Internet for thousands of people. So controlling who transmits when would be a nightmare, as well as requiring some more complicated hardware on the satellite. So they used phone lines rather than the satellite for the upload direction. Not really relevant to this project, I admit, but just thought I'd share. The modem part is fact, the other details just what I've worked out based on what I know about networking and satellites, I'm not a pro, just an enthusiast.

The gas station dish is much too small for GOES reception, the larger C band dish might work though.

TV should be free considering a show is shorter than the ad breaks

amazing so much stuff I also used to pull ex gov spook stuff from the breakers and dish mounts like that were valuable, great video ! (did you clean out the nesting spiders from the feed horn!)

Smart idea👍

As a Youth, I was King of an Evil Empire. Ruling Over an Empire of Pirate Satellite Signals, which We had Access to Every Channel in the known Universe. We had 10 HBO Channels, East, West, 1, 2, etc... ESPN , ESPN 2, ESPN 3, etc.... All the Adult Stations in the Galaxy....Also had the ABC, NBC, CBS Network Feeds, not to mention the Stations that Served Them.. which those would Feed Movies, Local Stations would Record and then Play during the Week on their Weekly Movie Slots... Same for Networking Stations, USA, TNT, etc... Those Played Loop Feeds of Programs... At First we had to put in Codes, for Certain Channels.... That did not Last, the Next Box had Boards that Deprogrammed Everything and would make Everything Visible... Never Realized as a Child, how many Stations that were Accessible... On Sundays, Every Football Game was Available, as well as any Race or anything else Ever Broadcasted... MTV, there were MANY MTVs, those were Like ESPN...

the satelite transmiter is probably ok(I mean it will work even though the service might be stopped) , they cover more than justa single channel,the indoor unit is what gets the updates in software. The outside is just the transmit and recieve antenna , as long as its in the right band for the satelite that you use C,KU,Ka it will be ok. You might hook it up toa different internet box or a tv box.

I would like to know the angles and direction to set up a dish

08:00 looks like an 8 Bay folded dipole antenna.. looks like UHF by the length of the dipoles.. or possibly Vhf, hard to tell from the video

Make sure you put a piece of EPDM or felt between that dish's brace and your flat roof or it could rub holes in your roof.

@saveitforparts The rebooting is is caused by too much current being pulled by the LNA (Old ones could pull a lot) and the limit on the USB from the computer. The USB power from the computer may be split by the other peripherals. Hack the meter and use an external USB supply so it only has the one load. Come to think of it, take out the batteries and use a power supply, that should do it. Good job.

Шикарная вещь! Очень интересно, что из этого получится!

The loop antenna on your roof is a Decible 450-470 MHZ 9 dbd repeater (mountaintop) antenna. 73, W7PM

The one laying on the roof is a commercial UHF repeater ant it's a very good ant , it can be used on the ham bands too . Try freq like 440.000 to 470s

Looks cool on your car roof !

thanks COOP ...

I found an old set of retractable rabbit ears in the trash. I hooked them up to the back of my tv and I get a ton of channels. My method seemed a little easier than this method, I think I'll stick with mine lol. I'm just messing around I just stumbled onto your video and I'm sure you have some kind of satellite hobby and endorphins fill your brain when you find individual satellites.

that homemade down converter looks like a prop from an old irwin allen tv show- LOL

Cool ooo-ray dude 😁

I had one of these… It’s a 1.74 M Hughes Internet Dish with a “Non Pen” mount. Mine required a RX and TX modem. It was about 2 grand for install… Monthly was about $100 and had bandwidth restrictions… 100-200 Kbs down… hacks to 300. Up was horrible. Had about a one second delay for clicks.. (can’t beat the speed of light). Weird fate in life, I sold these in a robotic form called Moto-Sat. Data Storn wad another name. Big with motor coaches. You could get lnb’s and offsets for Dish and Directv … memories serves on the 110

A very nice satellite antenna, I think my neighbors would mistake it for a ray gun. The good old V8 Finder 2, the battery in that device seems like a joke, I always see mine on the charger too. 😂

Have no idea what you're talking about but it's cool watching