OT: who's is largest? Not what you think!

[lazydays]

When I was in college I lived in a town with poor cable service and no over the air broadcasting. No way was I going to miss my weekly x-files fix. After digging around a bit, literally, I found a 10' satellite dish buried in pieces behind the library deans garage. I bought some nuts and bolts and put it back together, spray painted it black, and a friend of mine welded a base for it. I lived in a rental house so the base was four concrete blocks that the base attached to and I could independently raise or lower each point. The motorized arm was missing so I found a metal pipe and I notched it at the location of each satellite and locked it down with a clamp. The most expensive component was the wire and receiver (with no descrambler) for around $150.

Those were such happy days. A fun project, very little money spent, friends coming over for x-files and pizza. I miss college. I also miss the 24/7 bikini channel on the big dish. Yowza!

As for programming there used to be a weekly publication of "wild feeds" downloadable on the very new internet. Maybe it was usenet. I can't remember. Anyway, a wild feed was a show transmitted with no scrambling. Local tv stations picked it up and retransmitted with a time shift. So everything I watched was on east coast time.

I later moved to a very nice 8.5' dish with a fancy receiver and descrambler. I haven't looked into it in awhile but from what I understand big dish tv requires a lot of electronics these days making it very expensive. Someone else here probably knows more.

So, my dish was 10'. How big was your satellite dish?

[TheTominator]

I didn't use a satellite dish in my apartment in grad school.
I didn't subscribe to cable (too expensive for my budget), and the college town was too far away from broadcast towers to get anything over a standard commercial antenna (even a rooftop-mounted one).

Since I was only interested in one broadcast channel, I built a very narrow band, high-gain Yagi antenna from straight segments of copper wire, scotch tape, and cardboard. It worked very well.

[Buzz]

My little brother had a huge one in the late 80's/early 90's, and had similar fun to yours. He brought it with him when he moved, but after a bit of squabbling with the new neighbors, he gave up. It was at least a 12 footer, maybe a little bigger, and he got it from a friend that couldn't use it anymore, so lil bro found it to be an irresistible project.

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[GGD]

A local university has good sized one.

[freeradical]

I've never had a satellite dish, but I do know why they were bigger back then.

The bigger a dish is, the more gain it has.

However, as operating frequency increases, the gain of any given antenna increases.

For example, a 10 foot dish has approximately 27 db gain over an isotropic radiator at 1 GHz.

At 10 GHz, the same antenna has around 47 db, or a 100 fold increase of gain.

At 10 GHz, a 2 foot dish has around 33 db of gain. This is a 6 db, or a four fold increase in gain of compared to the 10 foot dish operating at 1 GHz.

[Jimmypoo]

I used to use 12 of the larger 4.5 meter dishes in a cluster for crystal clear reception, but the damned
students and E.T freaks would not stop asking to hook up their “Receivers” until I finally had the area
fenced and kept slightly underfed dobermans inside the fence.


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Since I’ve moved, it’s easier to carry and set up a small array of varying sizes, one for each channel I want to receive.
A few simple racks (well, 13 racks, actually, with 52 receivers) on wheels, are so much easier to move!
I’m going to upgrade to a 23” LCD very soon. Maybe even one with 1080p!


Next, I have to get off of dial-up and maybe get some kind of broadband for the computer.
(I have heard an OC-768 with DWDM at 412 “colors” would be awesome for downloading porn!).