Morning everybody
I have now put my "receiving station" together for Chasing Midnight (yes I know I take it far too seriously, but 2010 has been the crappiest year ever for me and this will prove a very welcome distraction at the end!)
The photo with the dishes in it show my "reserve" dish for 19/13E through a monoblock on the right. The smaller dish on the left (60cms) has an old 0.6dB LNB on it and is pointing towards 28E.
Also, my main motorised dish is not visible and covers the arc from 57E round to 37.5W. In days of yore when there was stuff on the Intelsats at 60+ degrees East, I could get those as well. The Intelsats at 43W and beyond are invisible to the dish cos the house is in the way!
Re: The receiving station. Because I've compressed the photo, I don't know how visible it is. There are three satellite boxes; from left to right, they are a Technomate TM5400 Non-super, with a 4GB USB stick in it for recording. This is connected to the 19/13E Monoblock on the Raven dish.
Next to that, there is a Technomate TM6900 HD Combo Super, which is connected to the motorised dish. There is a 160GB HDD plugged into that, which is sitting on top of the computer's loudspeaker which is sitting on top of the TM5400!
Last of all, there is an elderly Manhattan Plaza ST550 with an internal HDD (can't remember its capacity - 100GB?) This is connected to the fixed 28E dish. The small LCD screen sitting on top of the TM6900 is connected to this. On 31 December, I envisage that this will be displaying Sky News ex 28E almost all of the time; as indeed it was in this photo (displaying the 'Stop Smoking' advert.)
The larger LCD TV sitting on top of the Manhattan is connected to all three receivers simultaneously. The screen caption is from APTN on Eutelsat W2A at 10E (10.970V 4167+5/6).
The computer screen on the left is connected to my computer(!) which runs Compro DTV4 for screen grabs. I had to install a circuit board internally for this - quite an achievement for somebody of my abilities!
At the time of taking the photo, I had switched in the Technomate TM5400 which was displaying BFM TV News (France) from 13E. I can take screen grabs from any receiver, but most of the time I will be doing it from the 6900. If two midnights are happening simultaneously in different countries, I can grab "live" from one receiver, whilst recording the alternate midnight on another one and then 'grabbing' from that a few minutes later.
Thank you for reading this nonsense and if you're not asleep yet, I salute you! :-thumbup
Ed.
Propably will watch news channels throughout the day, then russian celebratings on all their channels (even sport, and movie channels will broadcast national anthem and Medvedev's speech), then my local - Latvia's celebrations and fireworks, and later german and of course fabulous - London fireworks at 2AM local time.