re: My neighbor still has a satellite, I'm confused

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When he watches the spice channel does the dish rotating give him away?

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I know you are making a joke, but in the Big Ugly Dish era before digital and entire channel line ups on a single satellite like DIRECTV, there were several satellites scattered across the sky in an equatorial arc. HBO could have been at 110 degrees west while another satellite could have been at 75 degrees for another channel you watched. The dish didn’t have to move much it just had to move along the arc. Usually there is an arm that moves the dish in an left or right motion.

Each satellite had up to 24 transponders or channels of C band analog video in alternating horizontal and vertical polarization to avoid adjacent channel interference. So if you want to go to that special channel your dish’s receiver had to be tied in with a positioner and had to move an arm to line the dish up to that particular satellite you wanted and then tune in the channel.

After C-Band was KU, C-Band was more reliable than KU as CBand is around 3.5 to 4.2 GHz. KU was around 12 GHz and was more prone to rain fade which was why it was mainly used for News and back haul feeds.


Then eventually digital came around and split those transponders into smaller groups and added multiple channels on the same frequency line over the air digital TV.

You can see what is still up there. There is a site called Lyngsat that keeps a log of what is still up there and what is encrypted and unencrypted.

Fun fact, LPB has a transponder up there to backhaul its programming to the Local LPB stations across the state. I think that is how they send out the lottery numbers on an unused portion of it.