My introduction to the hobby came in a strange way, it was all down to the Eurovision Song Contest believe it or not!
I've always had an interest in foreign music and have always had an interest in the contest for this reason (even if the UK do take the p*** out of it). For many people, it's a one night event but it actually runs for several months when you include the televised qualification shows that many countries hold to pick their entry. With the fan community being so large, most people rely solely on live streams of national broadcasters in order to watch these. With the introduction of YouTube live streams, it's pretty seamless and problem free these days. But before that was a thing, the streams were delivered on the servers of each broadcaster. As you can imagine, the sudden surge of hits caused the websites of less well known broadcasters to crash or buffer outrageously. I did some research and found that most of these shows were actually being broadcast FTA on international channels (TVE, ERT World, TRT Int, RTPi, SVT World) so one Saturday afternoon I bought one of those cheap Lidl satellite kits and just tried my luck setting it up. To my surprise, after about an hour I was pointed at 13E and watching seamlessly (while everyone else was struggling with streams!).
That was it, I had the itch and relatively quickly wanted to explore more satellites and go bigger than 40cm.
