Why I won’t give up my C band dish
By Tim Alderman
A 9 month odyssey started when they took away my
analog
feed of the
History Bistory Channel
While I knew it was coming, it was still a shock. My twelve foot Paraclipse Dish, similar to
the ones I built for Sat FACTS 
back in 1995 and 96, has seen a decline in
programming available on analog for years now.
On January first of this year, Turner Classic Movies suddenly, and with only 4 hours notice,
disappeared from the arc. This affected
a good friend, who watched it all the time, but for me it was just another sad
note of the fact that people have been tearing out their C band and going to
either Directv or Dish Network, the two DBS or “little dish” providers.
I
give funny names to favorite things. It
wasn’t just the History Channel, but the History Bistory Channel that I
watched, when not on the news. Late last year the East Coast feed had gone,
just suddenly, it was off the air. But
I still had the West Coast feed, which gave me my fix of “Modern Marvels” and
of course WWII coverage almost wall-to-wall. It was analog, pure, direct and
full of the sharp inner detail that digital lacks.
I
had been eyeing advertisements for some time, even on CNN, about a third DBS
provider just making it’s debut. It was called VOOM, and it offered to lease me
3 IRDs and install them for a dollar.
The ad said, “why even your couch has a dollar”. On January 31st, the remaining analog feed for History
Bistory Channel was gone, poof.
ARRRRGH, they hit home!
A&E
Networks, owner of the channel, sent me an email suggesting I subscribe to one
of the DBS providers, and named two, or get cable. They don’t know that I spent 3 years of my life volunteering to
build and maintain a satellite dish owner radio talk station a decade before,
that was driven off the air by cable.
My C band programmer, National Programming Service (NPS), said “We are
sorry, but they have discontinued service”, and offered me a credit for the
remaining portion of my $12.95 a year programming fee.
My
heart sunk, the giant money machine corporations that control access to the
public park in the sky had once again refused to deal. NPS said the service had gone to SA
PowerVu. I said “hey wait a minute, I
HAVE ONE”. That was like pissing
against the wind in a cyclone. BUT, maybe if I can find 2 friends to split the
cost, and go for the VOOM package deal, I could swallow my pride and mount one
of those steenking MONOPOLY DISHES on the side of my house.
The
VOOM Lady, Kelly Dalton, came to visit my dealer, and part time employer,
Myron. I had talked to him about the
new service, and he decided to see if he could re-enter residential market
sales by offering this service. Yes,
yes they had HD all over the place, all about their HDTV programming, “twenty
one channels of high definition bliss”, but that was a side show for me. I wanted my History Bistory Channel, and
here was a way, all be it rather expensive, to get it back.
Myron
hired me to erect my custom feed (see SF120) and try to bring in terrestrial
channels that were offered as part of the VOOM IRD package. He also talked me into trying something new,
leasing equipment. The demo with Kelly
had been a success. The
low-to-the-horizon VOOM feed at 61.5 degrees west may have presented problems
for the average DBS installer, but for me, a piece of cake. After the meeting, it was all set. I would
pay 1/3rd of the $65 a month fee to get what I wanted, to see, once
again, the H in the lower right hand corner of my screen, and recover the
History Bistory Channel. Never mind
the fact that I was supposed to keep all 3 IRD’s. Kelly said that was the least of their problems, and it would be
two years at least before they installed software that required the IRD to be
connected to a phone line, and report where it was calling from. So, problem
solved, all be it for a ridiculous price, I hid the DBS dish in the back where nobody
could see I was a traitor to my beloved C band. 
March
2005 came and went. In the meantime,
NPS had managed to find a way to convince A&E Networks to allow Digicipher
access to their HITS[1]
feed on Galaxy 4 Ku, the same feed they supply cable. As soon as I heard that, I subscribed to the “Absolute Digital
Package” offered by NPS, for $199 a year. 42 channels on top of 65 from VOOM,
nickels rolling out of the bag everywhere. I just had to have “diverse and
redundant routing” for my view of the big H.
It was a good thing I did this, as you will soon see.
I
quickly discovered that, yes indeed Matilda, there ARE differences in “digital
quality”, even of the same signal. CNN
on VOOM, C-SPAN too, had tearing from the analog signal they were downlinking at
their uplink site on Long Island, New York.
And the big H was not where near as sharp on the small dish. I could immediately tell it was a copy, as
the signal was delayed by the all to familiar 780 millisecond delay from the
satellite relay.
Yet
I also watched some of the VOOM channels, and discovered TVRO programming of
not-so-commercial nature on those HD channels was an interesting and eclectic
mix. My friends also raved about the programming they were getting. But it was not to last.
On
April fool’s day, VOOM took down their web site and said, in it’s place, it was
no joke. They were going off the air at the end of the month. The New York Times newspaper had a couple of
articles about a boardroom battle between father and son of a cable company
that owned VOOM. The very next day the
furor subsided, and they were suddenly back in business. A week later came the news they were adding
channels.
Strange
thing was also happening at NPS. They
had a new ceo, and this fellow was not about to do what had been done
previously, let C band slide slowly back to what it was when I first worked in
satellite, with no programming at all.
NPS not only brought back my History Bistory Channel, but Turner Classic
Movies, and a bunch of other programming that had died and gone to DBS and
cable in recent years. So here I was,
starting to feel good about the fact I had dedicated my life to C band, almost
two decades before. One man CAN make a
difference, and two men, in different places, had decided they wanted my
business, sending them money every month.
But,
it was not to last. The son gathered
strength and soon ousted the father from his nest in a boardroom coup,
according to the Times. VOOM had been
an $800 million mistake because they entered with to little and to late. It seems that they were fighting even bigger
money from Charlie Ergen (Dish Network) and Rupert Murdoch (Directv), who were
intent on squashing a nascent competitor before it could achieve critical
mass. Struck me like a familiar tune,
a de-ja-vieu from my days at the radio station, watching as giants swung battle
axes at eachother, and hearing their thunder seep under the boardroom
door.
By
April 30th, VOOM was all but gone.
Yet their satellite was co-located with Ergen’s at that 61.5 degree west
orbital slot. And so Ergen had brought
their satellite, already in orbit, for a paltry figure, reported to be $200
million. Paltry in giant money machine business terms. As the day approached, VOOM started to
advertise “VOOM lives on, on Dish Network”.
It seems that Ergen had realized there was NO unique and original
programming, HD or otherwise, on DBS that was not copied, like my beloved H,
from C band.
So
I watched to see if VOOM would send a “kill signal” to unsubscribe the ATSC
portion of their IRDs in the field as they went off the air. Fortunately, they did not. These IRDs could still have a life after
VOOM as free-to-air terrestrial equipment.
In fact, I used one to diagnose signal-to-noise problems on the roof of
that rich man’s house, “Too Much Signal”, published in SatFACTS.
I
had also become hooked on the “VOOM HD originals”. Quirky, slightly offbeat
channels about exploring the world, and viewing art gallery paintings, RAVE HD
“This channel should be played LOUD”, and not to mention “GuyTV, TV for Guys”
which showed some movies in black and white HD, which looked surprisingly good.
I
wasn’t interested in “Americas Top 60” or anything like that, that Ergen
promoted. I had my programming from my C band dish, and I paid only a fraction
of the DBS prices either one of the remaining DBS services wanted. So I called up Echosphere, the corporate
name behind Dish Network, after I read of their offering 10 of the original
VOOM channels for a mere $5 a month.
BUT, there was a catch, two in fact.
Ergen, greedmaster that he is, had a deal, well sort of. If I agreed to pay him an “access fee” of $5
a month, AND if I were to subscribe to his HD package, at $9.99 a month, I
could get my VOOM channels.
Such
is temptation for programming from satellite. You get all used to the
schedules, bypass the programs that repeat ad infinitum, and find just those
offbeat gems of real interest, seeing things not normally associated with TV. Things I had loved with my C band dish,
watching programming from Shawn Kenny’s “Boresight”. Programming JUST for TVRO.
Ergen
even offered a promotion, “Subscribe and get HD pack for free for 6 months”.
Pretty good, if it worked. So I bought
his “Dish Pro 811 HD” IRD. I had the subscriptions
I wanted, and was back in the cat bird’s seat with the best of the best. Or so
I thought. Then the troubles began.
The
811 was no sweetheart IRD. In fact, it was a real dog. One of the local free-to-air channels from
San Francisco, KQED, offers 5 digitals in addition to their analog. This is
from PBS, which is a partially supported public broadcast service from the
taxpayers in the US. No commercial
station was going that far, only offering 1 or 2 digitals to go with their
analog. KQED decided to do something
called “dynamic channel remapping” when, at 8PM nightly, they switched OFF 3
digital channels and turned ON their HD.
My
original ATSC tuner supported this. Not so, mister Ergen’s 811. Not only did it refuse to remap, it went, putting
it mildly, catatonic. It stopped
receiving any channel, even satellite.
Fortunately the troubleshooter in me managed to figure out that if I
unplugged it, and then did a “master reset”, it would come back. Back all naked, with my favorites, everything
I programmed into that bloody box now gone.
I
pounded on Myron’s desk.. “Ergen sold
me a piece of crap, this IRD goes beserk when KQED remaps nightly. Their
customer support knows of this, and there is no fix available. I want my money
back”. So I packed it up, every last
piece, the remote, warranty card, cables, everything. And took it to the shop.
Well
into June I asked “so where’s my refund”? and was told politely, Echosphere
doesn’t give refunds. They take your
money but they do not give it back, period.
If you want it, go get an attorney.
In the meantime, I was paying for subscriptions I was not getting. And two weeks later, I got a call “your
replacement IRD has arrived”. Huh?
Turns
out the only way to get anything for the $355 I had tied up in that IRD was to
accept the unit and go on from there, dynamic channel remap failure or no. I
had another ATSC tuner I could use, the old VOOM IRD. When I got the “refurbished” unit home, there was a tag to send
the old unit back, but no manual, remote or cables. SO I had a unit and not much beyond the front panel to change
channels or setup my favorites. I
hollered about no remote, and a month later, one eventually showed up. In the
meantime, I had called Dish Network and they wanted $49.95 for a new
remote. Instead, I opted to try eBay,
where I found dozens of them for $9.95 - $29.95, some brand new, up for auction.
So I bought one to have some civilized control of my IRD while waiting
for Echosphere to give that replacement.
Eventually I also got a manual, but this I had to pay $10 for. I never
did get warranty card or cables, ohh well.
When
I reactivated the subscription, having been hooked this far, I figured, what
the hey, let’s see how dealing with Ergen is for billing. Not to good, it turns out. Remember I said that Ergen takes money but
policy prohibits ever sending any?
Well, that “6 months free” for the $9.99 HD pack, was ONLY good if you
called and they made an “adjustment”.
How many people would remember to ask for their discount in this
way? DBS moneymen makes their huge
dollar investment pay by making the customer pay attention. By the second month, the customer service
operator said “you already have that adjustment on your bill” When I asked to speak with a supervisor
“Well, that adjustment is made by another department and we have no access to
them here” Grrr.. I refused to take no for an answer, and eventually the second
adjustment was subtracted from my bill.
I had to repeat this every single month until the offer expired.
In
the meantime, Myron’s rich client, whose roof I had visited with that VOOM box,
wanted TIVO in his Directv box. The old
HD IRD he had been getting programming on for years, from “Hughes” was suddenly
available. I discretely asked if I could
“borrow” it for research. I had this
wild idea. If I am to lecture in
Tasmania next spring at the upcoming Australasia trade show and conference, I
need to be current on little dish stuff, right?
I
also wanted to see just how the “cow ate the cabbage” on DBS. I knew that both Murdoch and Ergen used the
same satellites. I decided to see if
there was way to combine a single antenna farm on the roof of a commercial
building, such as a highrise, and have Myron’s client, the landlord, be able to
offer his tenants EITHER SERVICE. All
I had to do was figure out how to make it work, and build an antenna “farm”
just for DBS.
Reasonable
people would take a standard DBS dish and use that. But, I am not reasonable. I knew that any experiments would involve
a lot more LOSS. Not wanting to starve
my newly conceived “test bed” I bought two 1.1meter reflectors and mounted them
in an inverted position, or, as Myron likes to call it, “mushroom” the dishes.
This is a slight of hand I used to save his lunch on the roofs of several
commercial buildings, because inverted dishes are much less of a sail in the
wind. DBS dishes, ALL OF THEM, are
vastly different from the C band kind. They are stamped steel with no support. Give a consumer a chance and unknowing hands
warp them like potato chips. I like my
Ruffles to have Ridges but I want my satellite reflectors to be straight to the
eye, within the Ku band tolerance of 20 thousandths of an inch. “De-warping” a
DBS reflector is not a chore for the inexperienced, and even I have had
failures in this.
The next issue was the LNBF. Ergen uses a “non-standard” mount that
connects the feed to the button hook than the more universal directv kind, even
though they downlink the same frequency band.
That was not all Ergen did.
There were several manufacturers of his “Dish Network” when he launched
in 1996 or so, but by 2004, he had taken control. Not only did his big money buy programming from VOOM, but he
wanted to make money from equipment sales also. Ingenious, when you control both the equipment AND the
programming, you can act like a monopoly, just like cable.
Ergen’s
method of doing this was to create a new product called “DISH PRO”. The LNBFs used by Directv use the DC power
voltage to control polarity, 13V for one, 18V for the other. They have two F connectors. And therein lies
the rub. In a multiple dwelling unit, you have to have BOTH polarities
available. The switch that the IRD
talks to, selects which to send. So
unlike C band, the LNBF and the IRD have a two way communications set up. DISH PRO takes this a step further. The IRD can tell the LNBF to STACK both
polarities, thus bringing the whole bird down on a single piece of RG6.
Ergen
did not develop this overnight. He
started out using the same technology as Directv but managed to take control
away from those wanting to use common equipment. Yet he had to leave some semblance of backwards compatibility in
his switches and his IRD’s. So how
does one connect a Dish Pro IRD to a generic or “Standard” LNBF? Simple.
It turns out that Ergen had a chief designer who quit and went to Korea.
This man created a company called “Microroyal” and built Dish Pro compatible
switches. “Under the hood” it turns out
Ergen had used a standard called DiSEqC that changes satellites. Microroyal
offered these, via sellers on eBay, for a pittance compared to the hundreds of
dollars Ergen wants for his brand named units.
So
the DiSEqC switch gets commands from the IRD as to which satellite and polarity,
which in turn controls the LNBF. Dishes have become so cheap that a standard
evolved to use multiple dishes to change satellites rather than the traditional
way used in C band, the actuator or jack to move the dish.
Ergen
countered his former employee turned competitor with a real smart move of his
own. He called it “DISH PRO PLUS”. In
this method, Dish Pro switches only talk to Dish Pro LNBF’s, they simply do not
recognize anything else. And Dish Pro
Plus combines a multi-satellite “twin” LNBF with an INPUT that accepts signal
from a third satellite. Put a Dish Pro Plus out at the end of the line, and
even his Dish Pro switch gets bypassed. The IRD just doesn’t see it and talks
through it, to the LNBF instead. Ergen had always been a “multi-satellite”
provider, knowing that you can only pack so many channels at a single orbital
slot.
With seven million customers, Dish Network is
catching up on Directv, with eleven million. Murdoch’s Directv became sort of a giant, lumbering
along slowly. They were slow to adopt a multi-satellite yet single dish, or
what we used to call, a “simulsat” dish.
Realizing they had competation, of a sort, Directv launched a catchup
scheme by choosing 3 satellites, each nine degrees apart. In their setup, they call it an “oval”
because of the reflector’s shape. First
they had “SAT A” which was the bird they used at 101 degrees west orbital slot.
You MUST have SAT A connected to a Directv box for it to recognize anything. Then
they leased capacity on Ergen’s bird at 119 degree west orbital slot, needing
more and more transponder space to carry all the “local into local” channels
they wanted in every major marketplace in the US. And then they conceived of a way to further differentiate
themselves by using a special LO for the third, or 110 degree orbit. So both companies made things difficult for
some enterprising local business owner to combine the two on the rooftop. That third position Directv called “SAT C”
and made installers buy a special switch to get HD programming.
By
the time I realized all of this, I had a several hundred dollar investment
made, and 6 DBS dishes. I also decided
to try Dish Network’s version of Local-into-Local by getting what they call
“local channels” for $5.99 a month.
Once I had this, I decided to get another Dish Pro LNBF by having a dish
network installer come and install a dish just for the locals, from an orbital
slot of 148 degrees west. (It’s the
dish on the far left in the photo above) It shocked me to find out Ergen installed
this for free, all I had to do was sign a form. Yet he refused to put in
anything but a standard dish, a twin, with the single feed.
So
Ergen basically achieved his goal of separating his hardware from that of
Murdoch’s Directv. Only one polarity,
the 18v from the 119 degree west satellite, works on both. And Ergen has to be able to control that
with it’s DC voltage, or the Microroyal switch won’t recognize it. Thus it took six dish reflectors to receive
signals for both Directv HD and dish network HD IRD’s. Thank goodness for Myron’s client, loaning
me that IRD! To pay $44.95 a month
which is what Directv wants for ANY service, would send me to the poorhouse
real soon.
I
did manage to pull a coup, well sort of, on Ergen. Remember that 61.5 orbital slot, the one beside my house? To get a Dish Pro LNBF to physically fit on
a standard button hook, I found a “satellite salvage” seller on eBay. They had found that Echosphere takes their
used equipment, in this case LNBF’s, from the field and removes the outer
plastic shell. This exposes the
waveguide and ruins it for resale. But
for me, humm, I need an LNBF throat to grab with the standard buttonhook feed
support tube. I merely taped it with
electrical tape and Scotchcoated the entire thing to weatherproof it. The distance between that dish and the
remaining 5 is a distance of almost 200 feet. 
So I
had to use RG11 cable to reduce the loss.
Even though I had signals strength about 4 to 6dB hotter than standard,
this was still not enough to have the DiSEqC Microroyal switch talk to it
reliably. And once that was sorted
out, the 811 Dish Pro IRD would see the LNBF, but not talk. So I had to add
RG11 back from the switch to my room.
So,
now, finally, peace of mind in signal gluttony land. With 4 operating satellite systems, 
I can
watch my History Bistory Channel on C band, and fallback protect it with
Directv. And be able to say something to the attendees at next year’s trade
show about US DBS satellites.
So,
if you plan to attend, you will be able to hear speakers who know what in heck
is going on in TVRO today. And who
still love their analog C band reception systems. At least one.