On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 05:48:49 -0400, "Michael Baugh" wrote:
Maybe you can tell why, nowadays, a 10' dish for TVRO?

C band performance during rain fade, or for receiving satellites near
the ends of the visible arc. A 6 footer just won't cut it in those cases,
you need the greater gain.

While lots of people just subscribe to the packaged Ku band DBS
feeds (DirecTV, Dish Network, etc) which only require a fixed 18 inch
dish, there's much more out there to be found on C band (also a lot
to be found on Ku band that an 18 inch dish won't pick up). I can
receive raw back haul feeds from news and sporting events, foreign
TV from European satellites low on my horizon, some commercial,
government, and military closed circuit feeds, etc.

Much of it isn't interesting, some is. One of my favorite TV shows
comes from TV Dubai. It is in Arabic, so I don't understand what they
say, but I know what it is. I've dubbed it Arabian Bandstand because
it is a direct ripoff of the old American Bandstand show. The host
even resembles Dick Clark, with a moustache. They play older
American rock and roll, with the lyrics redubbed in Arabic. It is a
hoot.

I used my bigger dish to follow the Clementine probe to the Moon.
I was getting the raw data same as NASA was. That was cool,
and once I whipped up some decoding software, allowed me to
crosscheck what they were posting on the web about what it was
discovering.

Even my bigger dish can't receive the signals from the Mars rovers,
but technical advances, and the higher power missions planned
for the future, should one day make signals from Mars receivable
on my setup. (I did follow Mars Express out to 4 million miles before
I lost the signal.)

I suppose the real answer to why a large dish is *because I can*.
In a way it is like, why listen to shortwave radio? There are a lot
more voices out there than just the formula pap fed to us here.

Gary