Dumbed down consumer electronics: Adding DTV channels

Paul Keinanen
Guest

Sat Aug 14, 2010 10:01 am

On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:14:56 +0100, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

Quote:

On 14/08/2010 06:58, JosephKK wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:43:03 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:13:17 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now

At what baud rate?

The baud rate was specified as 2400 baud on the line above.

Quote:

This doesn't make any sense. CIS was offering file
sharing between users from the early 80's at about $10/hour. And almost
every hardware vendor worth their salt had a forum on Compuserve with
all their various support files available online for download.

2400baud = 15kB/min = 67mins
9600baud = 1kb/sec = 8 mins

Those may be raw through put numbers, but with simple half duplex
protocols such as Xmodem, each packet is acknowledged, before the next
packet is sent. Due to line turn around delays, this will
significantly reduce the effective throughput.

In those days the lower level telephone network was analog and
connections suffered from crosstalks from other lines, e.g. pulses for
the billing system and dialing pulses etc.

With a bad noisy line, the data frames were frequently corrupted,
requiring a retransmission, usually after a timeout, so the effective
throughput was way below what you would get from a raw connection at
that line speed.

Quote:

Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it
or go without.

Strange companies you dealt with. Mailing floppies was commonplace in
that era to supply software. I still have stuff on 8", 5.25" and 3.5".

One BBS network on Iceland used a sneakernet. An Icelandic person flew
each week to work in England, carrying with him all messages going
abroad on floppies and when returning back on Friday, he carried all
messages directed to Iceland on floppies.

Joerg
Guest

Sat Aug 14, 2010 5:22 pm

Paul Keinanen wrote:

Quote:

On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:14:56 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/08/2010 06:58, JosephKK wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:43:03 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:13:17 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
At what baud rate?

The baud rate was specified as 2400 baud on the line above.

This doesn't make any sense. CIS was offering file
sharing between users from the early 80's at about $10/hour. And almost
every hardware vendor worth their salt had a forum on Compuserve with
all their various support files available online for download.

2400baud = 15kB/min = 67mins
9600baud = 1kb/sec = 8 mins

Those may be raw through put numbers, but with simple half duplex
protocols such as Xmodem, each packet is acknowledged, before the next
packet is sent. Due to line turn around delays, this will
significantly reduce the effective throughput.

In those days the lower level telephone network was analog and
connections suffered from crosstalks from other lines, e.g. pulses for
the billing system and dialing pulses etc.

With a bad noisy line, the data frames were frequently corrupted,
requiring a retransmission, usually after a timeout, so the effective
throughput was way below what you would get from a raw connection at
that line speed.

Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it
or go without.
Strange companies you dealt with. Mailing floppies was commonplace in
that era to supply software. I still have stuff on 8", 5.25" and 3.5".

One BBS network on Iceland used a sneakernet. An Icelandic person flew
each week to work in England, carrying with him all messages going
abroad on floppies and when returning back on Friday, he carried all
messages directed to Iceland on floppies.

That's not the sneaker-net. That used to be the kerosene-net :-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

Joerg
Guest

Sat Aug 14, 2010 5:26 pm

JosephKK wrote:

Quote:

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:43:03 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:13:17 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
that would be a few seconds and included (and would dissapear) in my
monthly. Today, a sloppy webpage will eat up a MB or more, and an
overnight DL would be about 5 GB; over 5 thousand times the data
volume. Just about 20 years difference.
In those cases I'd rather send them a SASE envelope, a blank diskette
and $20 for the effoert to copy and the walk by the mail room. Then use
the remaining $80 for a nice dinner with the wife.
Probably would have if it was available that way at that time.
What wasn't available? Stamps? Envelopes? Dinner? Wife? Ok then, maybe a
girlfriend?

Ok, diskettes could be hard to come by but we sometimes used audio
cassettes for data storage. Those were cheap. I believe Commodore called
them datasettes.
Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it
or go without.

Well, at $100 which was a lot of money back then I am sure you could
have found someone who'd download it for you via a local call, then send
you the tape. You pay him $50 and keep the other $50. Win-win :-)

This was not even in the early WWW days. There barely was Usenet. I
almost could fly there and back cheaper. But i had _NO_ means to
_find_a_local_ for the described advantage. The infrastructure just
was NOT there.

You could not find a hungry student at Clarkson who wouldn't sneeze at
making $50 in an hour or two? I find that a bit hard to believe.

I had a fairly high-tech side job at my university starting around 1980
and that paid $5. I'd have jumped at that oppotunity.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz
Guest

Sat Aug 14, 2010 6:51 pm

On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:22:41 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid> wrote:

Quote:

Paul Keinanen wrote:
On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:14:56 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/08/2010 06:58, JosephKK wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:43:03 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:13:17 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
At what baud rate?

The baud rate was specified as 2400 baud on the line above.

This doesn't make any sense. CIS was offering file
sharing between users from the early 80's at about $10/hour. And almost
every hardware vendor worth their salt had a forum on Compuserve with
all their various support files available online for download.

2400baud = 15kB/min = 67mins
9600baud = 1kb/sec = 8 mins

Those may be raw through put numbers, but with simple half duplex
protocols such as Xmodem, each packet is acknowledged, before the next
packet is sent. Due to line turn around delays, this will
significantly reduce the effective throughput.

In those days the lower level telephone network was analog and
connections suffered from crosstalks from other lines, e.g. pulses for
the billing system and dialing pulses etc.

With a bad noisy line, the data frames were frequently corrupted,
requiring a retransmission, usually after a timeout, so the effective
throughput was way below what you would get from a raw connection at
that line speed.

Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it
or go without.
Strange companies you dealt with. Mailing floppies was commonplace in
that era to supply software. I still have stuff on 8", 5.25" and 3.5".

One BBS network on Iceland used a sneakernet. An Icelandic person flew
each week to work in England, carrying with him all messages going
abroad on floppies and when returning back on Friday, he carried all
messages directed to Iceland on floppies.

That's not the sneaker-net. That used to be the kerosene-net Smile

A former manager used to say "it's hard to beat the bandwidth of a 747 filled
with 9-track tapes".

Martin Brown
Guest

Mon Aug 16, 2010 8:02 am

On 14/08/2010 18:51, krw_at_att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:

Quote:

On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:22:41 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid> wrote:

Paul Keinanen wrote:
On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:14:56 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/08/2010 06:58, JosephKK wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:43:03 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:13:17 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
At what baud rate?

The baud rate was specified as 2400 baud on the line above.

This doesn't make any sense. CIS was offering file
sharing between users from the early 80's at about $10/hour. And almost
every hardware vendor worth their salt had a forum on Compuserve with
all their various support files available online for download.

2400baud = 15kB/min = 67mins
9600baud = 1kb/sec = 8 mins

Those may be raw through put numbers, but with simple half duplex
protocols such as Xmodem, each packet is acknowledged, before the next
packet is sent. Due to line turn around delays, this will
significantly reduce the effective throughput.

In those days the lower level telephone network was analog and
connections suffered from crosstalks from other lines, e.g. pulses for
the billing system and dialing pulses etc.

With a bad noisy line, the data frames were frequently corrupted,
requiring a retransmission, usually after a timeout, so the effective
throughput was way below what you would get from a raw connection at
that line speed.

I don't recall having that much trouble with Compuserve even in the
early days. Maybe US phone lines are a lot noisier than here?

Quote:

Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it
or go without.
Strange companies you dealt with. Mailing floppies was commonplace in
that era to supply software. I still have stuff on 8", 5.25" and 3.5".

One BBS network on Iceland used a sneakernet. An Icelandic person flew
each week to work in England, carrying with him all messages going
abroad on floppies and when returning back on Friday, he carried all
messages directed to Iceland on floppies.

That's not the sneaker-net. That used to be the kerosene-net :-)

A former manager used to say "it's hard to beat the bandwidth of a 747 filled
with 9-track tapes".

Second generation VLBI did it with a truck load of standard VHS
cassettes using a custom modulation scheme to store blocks of 300GB per
session. S2 recorders could do 128Mbits/s for 5 hours the hardware was
expensive. The previous generation were open reel and harder to use.

There were only a handful of correlators in the world that could
actually read this format so the media had to be moved to use them. All
participating scopes had to have a recorder and H2 maser clock.

Regards,
Martin Brown

JosephKK
Guest

Tue Aug 17, 2010 4:23 am

On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:14:56 +0100, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

Quote:

On 14/08/2010 06:58, JosephKK wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:43:03 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:13:17 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now

At what baud rate? This doesn't make any sense. CIS was offering file
sharing between users from the early 80's at about $10/hour. And almost
every hardware vendor worth their salt had a forum on Compuserve with
all their various support files available online for download.

This was about 22 years ago, 2400 baud modems were still newish and
9600 baud modems were expen$ive to buy and there was a big premium
9600 baud access.

Quote:

2400baud = 15kB/min = 67mins
9600baud = 1kb/sec = 8 mins

14k4 modems with a relatively cheap chipset were available in 1991
before WWW. By 1994 I had a Boca 28k8 V34 - the last of my modems to
come in a nice solid extruded aluminium case with a price to match.

Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it
or go without.

Strange companies you dealt with. Mailing floppies was commonplace in
that era to supply software. I still have stuff on 8", 5.25" and 3.5".

Not a company, a university based server.

Well, at $100 which was a lot of money back then I am sure you could
have found someone who'd download it for you via a local call, then send
you the tape. You pay him $50 and keep the other $50. Win-win :-)

This was not even in the early WWW days. There barely was Usenet. I
almost could fly there and back cheaper. But i had _NO_ means to
_find_a_local_ for the described advantage. The infrastructure just
was NOT there.

Compuserve probably would have done it with a local call for $10/hour
and FIDOnet almost for free.

The other end was never connected to Compuserve, for that matter
neither was I; too expensive.

Quote:

Regards,
Martin Brown

JosephKK
Guest

Tue Aug 17, 2010 4:35 am

On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:26:47 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid>
wrote:

Quote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:43:03 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:13:17 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
that would be a few seconds and included (and would dissapear) in my
monthly. Today, a sloppy webpage will eat up a MB or more, and an
overnight DL would be about 5 GB; over 5 thousand times the data
volume. Just about 20 years difference.
In those cases I'd rather send them a SASE envelope, a blank diskette
and $20 for the effoert to copy and the walk by the mail room. Then use
the remaining $80 for a nice dinner with the wife.
Probably would have if it was available that way at that time.
What wasn't available? Stamps? Envelopes? Dinner? Wife? Ok then, maybe a
girlfriend?

Ok, diskettes could be hard to come by but we sometimes used audio
cassettes for data storage. Those were cheap. I believe Commodore called
them datasettes.
Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it
or go without.

Well, at $100 which was a lot of money back then I am sure you could
have found someone who'd download it for you via a local call, then send
you the tape. You pay him $50 and keep the other $50. Win-win :-)

This was not even in the early WWW days. There barely was Usenet. I
almost could fly there and back cheaper. But i had _NO_ means to
_find_a_local_ for the described advantage. The infrastructure just
was NOT there.

You could not find a hungry student at Clarkson who wouldn't sneeze at
making $50 in an hour or two? I find that a bit hard to believe.

All i had was a telephone number for the server, no student body list
(let alone with telephone numbers), no known contact points of any
kind for anybody there. All that server did was send and receive
files, no access to anything else, not even email.

It is not like being a local U, i was in Lost Angeles and Clarkson is
on the EAST coast, no chance to go to the campus and find a student.
No email address to work with either, nor did i even have a personal
email address back then.

Quote:

I had a fairly high-tech side job at my university starting around 1980
and that paid $5. I'd have jumped at that oppotunity.

Martin Brown
Guest

Tue Aug 17, 2010 11:57 am

On 17/08/2010 04:23, JosephKK wrote:

Quote:

On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:14:56 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/08/2010 06:58, JosephKK wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:43:03 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:13:17 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now

At what baud rate? This doesn't make any sense. CIS was offering file
sharing between users from the early 80's at about $10/hour. And almost
every hardware vendor worth their salt had a forum on Compuserve with
all their various support files available online for download.

This was about 22 years ago, 2400 baud modems were still newish and
9600 baud modems were expen$ive to buy and there was a big premium
9600 baud access.

Early PC dialup 9600 modems were not cheap or particularly reliable.
ISTR The launch of low cost effective Rockwell chipsets was about 1991
with V32 MNP and fax built in. Prices plunged a couple of years later.

Quote:

2400baud = 15kB/min = 67mins
9600baud = 1kb/sec = 8 mins

14k4 modems with a relatively cheap chipset were available in 1991
before WWW. By 1994 I had a Boca 28k8 V34 - the last of my modems to
come in a nice solid extruded aluminium case with a price to match.

Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it
or go without.

Strange companies you dealt with. Mailing floppies was commonplace in
that era to supply software. I still have stuff on 8", 5.25" and 3.5".

Not a company, a university based server.

University servers were on EPSS, Arpanet or in the UK SRCnet/JANET from
around the mid to late 70's. Dedicated networks for astronomers were
already fully operational by end 1980. It was possible to move fairly
big research datasets overnight across the backbone although you would
get warnings for doing it too often.

http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/ccd/literature/serc_bulletins/sb_spring81.htm

Quote:

Well, at $100 which was a lot of money back then I am sure you could
have found someone who'd download it for you via a local call, then send
you the tape. You pay him $50 and keep the other $50. Win-win :-)

This was not even in the early WWW days. There barely was Usenet. I
almost could fly there and back cheaper. But i had _NO_ means to
_find_a_local_ for the described advantage. The infrastructure just
was NOT there.

Compuserve probably would have done it with a local call for $10/hour
and FIDOnet almost for free.

The other end was never connected to Compuserve, for that matter
neither was I; too expensive.

Cheapskate.

In that era everybody who was anybody was on CIS even in the UK -
including CEOs who needed help to logon every time they used it.

Regards,
Martin Brown

Joerg
Guest

Tue Aug 17, 2010 6:20 pm

JosephKK wrote:

Quote:

On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:26:47 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:43:03 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:13:17 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
that would be a few seconds and included (and would dissapear) in my
monthly. Today, a sloppy webpage will eat up a MB or more, and an
overnight DL would be about 5 GB; over 5 thousand times the data
volume. Just about 20 years difference.
In those cases I'd rather send them a SASE envelope, a blank diskette
and $20 for the effoert to copy and the walk by the mail room. Then use
the remaining $80 for a nice dinner with the wife.
Probably would have if it was available that way at that time.
What wasn't available? Stamps? Envelopes? Dinner? Wife? Ok then, maybe a
girlfriend?

Ok, diskettes could be hard to come by but we sometimes used audio
cassettes for data storage. Those were cheap. I believe Commodore called
them datasettes.
Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it
or go without.
Well, at $100 which was a lot of money back then I am sure you could
have found someone who'd download it for you via a local call, then send
you the tape. You pay him $50 and keep the other $50. Win-win Smile

This was not even in the early WWW days. There barely was Usenet. I
almost could fly there and back cheaper. But i had _NO_ means to
_find_a_local_ for the described advantage. The infrastructure just
was NOT there.

You could not find a hungry student at Clarkson who wouldn't sneeze at
making $50 in an hour or two? I find that a bit hard to believe.

All i had was a telephone number for the server, no student body list
(let alone with telephone numbers), no known contact points of any
kind for anybody there. All that server did was send and receive
files, no access to anything else, not even email.

It is not like being a local U, i was in Lost Angeles and Clarkson is
on the EAST coast, no chance to go to the campus and find a student.
No email address to work with either, nor did i even have a personal
email address back then.

All it would have taken is to contact a fraternity there :-)

Or an institute. At German universities we had a "Fachschaft" for each
discipline and that was essentially a self-help type body consisting of
older semester students that would help younger ones learn the ropes,
form study circles and so on. If you'd toss a $50 bounty in there the
whole room would have been abuzz in milliseconds. Ok, not all students
had telephones back then (I didn't) but many did.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

Joerg
Guest

Tue Aug 17, 2010 6:29 pm

JosephKK wrote:

Quote:

On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:14:56 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/08/2010 06:58, JosephKK wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:43:03 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:13:17 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
At what baud rate? This doesn't make any sense. CIS was offering file
sharing between users from the early 80's at about $10/hour. And almost
every hardware vendor worth their salt had a forum on Compuserve with
all their various support files available online for download.

This was about 22 years ago, 2400 baud modems were still newish and
9600 baud modems were expen$ive to buy and there was a big premium
9600 baud access.
2400baud = 15kB/min = 67mins
9600baud = 1kb/sec = 8 mins

14k4 modems with a relatively cheap chipset were available in 1991
before WWW. By 1994 I had a Boca 28k8 V34 - the last of my modems to
come in a nice solid extruded aluminium case with a price to match.

Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it
or go without.
Strange companies you dealt with. Mailing floppies was commonplace in
that era to supply software. I still have stuff on 8", 5.25" and 3.5".
Not a company, a university based server.
Well, at $100 which was a lot of money back then I am sure you could
have found someone who'd download it for you via a local call, then send
you the tape. You pay him $50 and keep the other $50. Win-win Smile

This was not even in the early WWW days. There barely was Usenet. I
almost could fly there and back cheaper. But i had _NO_ means to
_find_a_local_ for the described advantage. The infrastructure just
was NOT there.
Compuserve probably would have done it with a local call for $10/hour
and FIDOnet almost for free.

The other end was never connected to Compuserve, for that matter
neither was I; too expensive.

Huh? 1989 I had CompuServe. Being frugal (had just started
self-employed) I opted for the budget plan. IIRC that was 10h/month for
maybe $20, plus local phone charges which in Germany wasn't free. You
had to find the dial-in node that incurred the least in telephone
charges. If you exceeded the allotted CompuServe hours of your
particular plan they'd charge you per minute overages but those were
very reasonable, AFAIR less than 5c/min.

Pretty much any university could be reached via CompuServe. Not
necessarily on CompuServe's native (meaning proprietary) net of course
but they had lots of Gateways. Used them many times.

BTW, the best about CompuServe were their forums. Just like Usenet but
moderated.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

Michael A. Terrell
Guest

Thu Aug 26, 2010 4:57 pm

Joerg wrote:

Quote:

Jan Panteltje wrote:

Only thing I can say about it is that I love satellite.
With many many free programs here in Europe I guess we are spoiled.

In the US we do not have free satellite Sad

There is, but it's slim pickings.

<http://www.gosatellite.com/FTA-Learning-Center/FTA-Master-Channel-List>

Joerg
Guest

Thu Aug 26, 2010 5:29 pm

Michael A. Terrell wrote:

Quote:

Joerg wrote:
Jan Panteltje wrote:
Only thing I can say about it is that I love satellite.
With many many free programs here in Europe I guess we are spoiled.
In the US we do not have free satellite :-(

There is, but it's slim pickings.

http://www.gosatellite.com/FTA-Learning-Center/FTA-Master-Channel-List

And, quote "Purchase one of the recommended satellite packages below
....". You typically need a large expensive dish. Neighbors have those
but they sure are not cheap. Also, you get a full day's worth of
exercise digging a foundation, mixing concrete for that, and all this
fun stuff.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

Joel Koltner
Guest

Thu Aug 26, 2010 6:37 pm

"Joerg" <invalid_at_invalid.invalid> wrote in message
news:8dnj3iFjq7U1_at_mid.individual.net...

Quote:

And, quote "Purchase one of the recommended satellite packages below
...". You typically need a large expensive dish. Neighbors have those
but they sure are not cheap.

If you drive out into the countryside a bit you can often find people who'll
*give* you a Big Ugly Dish (BUD), having changed over to Dish Network or
DirectTV (with their 18" dishes) years back but not wanting the hassle of
removing the BUD.

Granted, you might need a new LNB...

---Joel

Michael A. Terrell
Guest

Thu Aug 26, 2010 11:10 pm

Joerg wrote:

Quote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joerg wrote:
Jan Panteltje wrote:
Only thing I can say about it is that I love satellite.
With many many free programs here in Europe I guess we are spoiled.
In the US we do not have free satellite :-(

There is, but it's slim pickings.

http://www.gosatellite.com/FTA-Learning-Center/FTA-Master-Channel-List

And, quote "Purchase one of the recommended satellite packages below
...". You typically need a large expensive dish. Neighbors have those
but they sure are not cheap. Also, you get a full day's worth of
exercise digging a foundation, mixing concrete for that, and all this
fun stuff.

A full day? I've put up entire C-band systems in a couple hours.
Most of that spent making sure the pipe is absolutely vertical, so the
polar mount will track.

As far as the hardware, I see used systems on Craig's list from time
to time.

Michael A. Terrell
Guest

Thu Aug 26, 2010 11:10 pm

Joel Koltner wrote:

Quote:

"Joerg" <invalid_at_invalid.invalid> wrote in message
news:8dnj3iFjq7U1_at_mid.individual.net...
And, quote "Purchase one of the recommended satellite packages below
...". You typically need a large expensive dish. Neighbors have those
but they sure are not cheap.

If you drive out into the countryside a bit you can often find people who'll
*give* you a Big Ugly Dish (BUD), having changed over to Dish Network or
DirectTV (with their 18" dishes) years back but not wanting the hassle of
removing the BUD.

Granted, you might need a new LNB...

Or walk out to my shop and dig out a spare. Wink