Free to Air Satelite

[Hunlock]

Anyone here use a free to air system(FTA)??? I'm thinking about putting a system together for one of my outbuildings....

 

I have the dish, LNB's, and the cable, but need a cheap receiver....Any advice out there?

 *EDIT to add: I am talking about LEGAL FTA, not hacking....just to be clear...lol

 

Thanks!

 

Tim

[Admin]

sorry,  i only know about the illegal ones... lol!     Even those are not working 100% anymore since the N3.   

[B-Dub Cigar Ambassador]

Sorry, but this is all Greek to me.
You guys are clearly existing on a higher plane.

[Djaric]

oo something else for me to nerdup on.  lol
I do't think I've heard of this.

[Hunlock]

a quick explanation on the LEGAL FTA:

Basically, there are a bunch of signals from satelites bounching around all the time. You take a free to air receiver(not dish or direct tv) and point it at certain satelights to receive the signals....Basic programming, plus usually some off the wall foreign stations...There is another form of FTA, but it is not legal. There is a bunch of info on it if you google it.

 

I was hoping more people knew what this is, and had some spare parts laying around..lol..ebay kills you with shipping...

[Skipper the cigar aFISHinodo]

I used to get sea surface temps form a dish I had set up in my old house. Infrared readings streamed in several times a day.. Alas, she got that too in the divorce settlement.

[-PO-]

a quick explanation on the LEGAL FTA:

Basically, there are a bunch of signals from satelites bounching around all the time. You take a free to air receiver(not dish or direct tv) and point it at certain satelights to receive the signals....Basic programming, plus usually some off the wall foreign stations...There is another form of FTA, but it is not legal. There is a bunch of info on it if you google it.

 

I was hoping more people knew what this is, and had some spare parts laying around..lol..ebay kills you with shipping...

What exactly are you looking for?  Shoot me a PM with more info

[Admin]

I used to get sea surface temps form a dish I had set up in my old house. Infrared readings streamed in several times a day.. Alas, she got that too in the divorce settlement.

There is a program you can get that will do that too.   You can use your laptop and a shortwave receiver.   You take the audio output from the radio into a special serial port device (maybe USB now too) and a program will read the transmission directly from the radio/sat link into your computer.   Would show surface temps every few minutes.   Was damn cool.     I think it was called HFFAX, WEFAX or some kind of "fax"...  

 

found it.

http://www.dxzone.com/cgi-bin/dir/jump2.cgi?ID=248

[Admin]

Skipper, you might want to take a look at SatFax.   Its $25 and does not require any extra hardware except your radio and an audio cable from the radio into your computer line-in.

http://www.hffax.de/html/software.htm

I played around with this stuff years ago before the internet was really mainstream.   it was darn cool back then and the software/hardware was a premium.   Looks like many good tools are avail for almost nothing if you have the time to play around with setting it all up.  


There is also the CoastWatch software which is free, but you need the NOAA data files to work with.    I know you can get "old" data from the NOAA for the software (about every 3 hours which sucks for fishing because its old data and you want to be on the fringe of the temp change areas).   Not sure how you could save live data feeds into it, if even possible.   it does look pretty slick as something extra to try.

http://coastwatch.noaa.gov/cw_cwfv3.html
http://coastwatch.noaa.gov/cw_dataprod_sst.html

[SmokyOneKenobi]

Sorry, but this is all Greek to me.
You guys are clearly existing on a higher plane.

fo shizzle brother Dub