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How I got into the "Satellite Scene" - please contribute your own experiences!
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<blockquote data-quote="jeallen01" data-source="post: 1040013" data-attributes="member: 176704"><p>OK, well here we go with the “new” thread about how I/we got into the “satellite scene”.</p><p></p><p>For my part, it started in the late 1980’s when I lived in Bristol for a few years and, through a social group, I went to a party in Clifton (one of the “upmarket” areas of the city!) where the host had a C-band dish mounted on the roof a block of flats, and I thought “that looks interesting”.</p><p></p><p>After that I started buying a few relevant mags, and notably “What Satellite” (or “WotSat” to most of us here – RIP!), and carried on when I came back to London in 1989, but had no time to do anything about getting a system until mid-1991 when I got 2 weeks extra holiday “in lieu” of all the overtime I had just been working. Having been reading WotSat and other mags for some time I had decided that I wanted to “dive straight in” by buying a steerable system, and especially an NEC 5000 system with an 80cm dish on an H-H mount. Looking through the mag ads, I found a Turkish-run shop in North London that advertised that system, went there and demo’d it, and bought it on the condition that it would include the dish and mount right outside the front door because I could see that the latter were already pretty well set up and aligned, and so all that I should have to do would be to get it firmly mounted on a very flat surface and pointed in the right direction. I then mounted it on the flat roof of the front bedroom bay window, cabled it to the lounge and – with quite a bit of effort – actually did get it pointed pretty much in the right direction! J</p><p></p><p>That was followed by various accessories to expand the system including Filmnet decoders and so on, and then, in the mid-1990s, I piggy-backed another LNB on the existing one and added an Sky analogue receiver, followed later in 1998 by one of the very first Amstrad Sky digital receivers.</p><p></p><p>A few years later I took the NEC dish & mount off the roof of the bay window because the bolts were causing that to leak, put it into temporary retirement, and put up the Raven Gemini 90 on a ground mount in the rear garden. I fitted 3 or 4 LNBs to that and managed to get around 5W to 28E! Later-on still (around 2000-2002) I put a scaffolding pole (where it is still in use for the TD110) near the other end of the garden and put the NEC dish and H-H mount back up on that. By this time the analogue-only NEC Rx was getting very out of date, and so I bought a TM 3000 DAPCI analogue and digital RX , and connected that up to the NEC motor (using dropper resistors in the motor cct because the Rx was a 36V drive whereas the NEC motor was 24V) – and then did nothing much else to the system, or even use it that much, until I retired 3yrs ago and had time to get back to this scene.</p><p></p><p>First job was to put up some fixed dishes that had also come from either the local recycling centre or other “s/h” sources over the previous years, and I tried to drive those via DiSEqC from the TM, but that was not practicable and so I bought an Icecrypt 33250 CCIHD, but that had problems sending the correct commands to the switches on the dishes, and it finally went back to Icecrypt UK – luckily before they went bust! Then, with a lot of help from people on this forum, I got a TM5402 M3 and a Vu+ Solo 2 (on reflection, the latter was NOT the best choice for a totally newbie to both the digital age and Enigma receivers!).</p><p></p><p>At the same time I updated the steerable dish and motor system with a s/h TD88 on a Supreme Dark Motor but that did not want to "play" with the Solo2 – only to be told by the supplier that Supreme motors did not “get on” with the commands from some Enigma 2 receivers, and so it was swopped for the Superior version, which does work with them.</p><p></p><p>In the meantime I did a lot of cabling/re-cabling to the house, and in particular to the upstairs bedroom which we now call the “office”, and then supplemented the later TM & VU+ Rx’s with several other receivers “and so on”.</p><p></p><p>That’s “sort of” where I am now – so how about you?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="jeallen01, post: 1040013, member: 176704"] OK, well here we go with the “new” thread about how I/we got into the “satellite scene”. For my part, it started in the late 1980’s when I lived in Bristol for a few years and, through a social group, I went to a party in Clifton (one of the “upmarket” areas of the city!) where the host had a C-band dish mounted on the roof a block of flats, and I thought “that looks interesting”. After that I started buying a few relevant mags, and notably “What Satellite” (or “WotSat” to most of us here – RIP!), and carried on when I came back to London in 1989, but had no time to do anything about getting a system until mid-1991 when I got 2 weeks extra holiday “in lieu” of all the overtime I had just been working. Having been reading WotSat and other mags for some time I had decided that I wanted to “dive straight in” by buying a steerable system, and especially an NEC 5000 system with an 80cm dish on an H-H mount. Looking through the mag ads, I found a Turkish-run shop in North London that advertised that system, went there and demo’d it, and bought it on the condition that it would include the dish and mount right outside the front door because I could see that the latter were already pretty well set up and aligned, and so all that I should have to do would be to get it firmly mounted on a very flat surface and pointed in the right direction. I then mounted it on the flat roof of the front bedroom bay window, cabled it to the lounge and – with quite a bit of effort – actually did get it pointed pretty much in the right direction! J That was followed by various accessories to expand the system including Filmnet decoders and so on, and then, in the mid-1990s, I piggy-backed another LNB on the existing one and added an Sky analogue receiver, followed later in 1998 by one of the very first Amstrad Sky digital receivers. A few years later I took the NEC dish & mount off the roof of the bay window because the bolts were causing that to leak, put it into temporary retirement, and put up the Raven Gemini 90 on a ground mount in the rear garden. I fitted 3 or 4 LNBs to that and managed to get around 5W to 28E! Later-on still (around 2000-2002) I put a scaffolding pole (where it is still in use for the TD110) near the other end of the garden and put the NEC dish and H-H mount back up on that. By this time the analogue-only NEC Rx was getting very out of date, and so I bought a TM 3000 DAPCI analogue and digital RX , and connected that up to the NEC motor (using dropper resistors in the motor cct because the Rx was a 36V drive whereas the NEC motor was 24V) – and then did nothing much else to the system, or even use it that much, until I retired 3yrs ago and had time to get back to this scene. First job was to put up some fixed dishes that had also come from either the local recycling centre or other “s/h” sources over the previous years, and I tried to drive those via DiSEqC from the TM, but that was not practicable and so I bought an Icecrypt 33250 CCIHD, but that had problems sending the correct commands to the switches on the dishes, and it finally went back to Icecrypt UK – luckily before they went bust! Then, with a lot of help from people on this forum, I got a TM5402 M3 and a Vu+ Solo 2 (on reflection, the latter was NOT the best choice for a totally newbie to both the digital age and Enigma receivers!). At the same time I updated the steerable dish and motor system with a s/h TD88 on a Supreme Dark Motor but that did not want to "play" with the Solo2 – only to be told by the supplier that Supreme motors did not “get on” with the commands from some Enigma 2 receivers, and so it was swopped for the Superior version, which does work with them. In the meantime I did a lot of cabling/re-cabling to the house, and in particular to the upstairs bedroom which we now call the “office”, and then supplemented the later TM & VU+ Rx’s with several other receivers “and so on”. That’s “sort of” where I am now – so how about you? [/QUOTE]
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