Free TV With An Old Satellite Internet Dish

hi and welcome back to the save it for parts channel once again we're doing unwise things with old surplus satellite dishes are we going to be using one of my rv dishes here nope we're not not using this one either how about my tv dish here with the little pointer system no we're not using that one today either maybe it's time to finally do something with the c-band dish that's just been cluttering up the yard but no we're not going to use that one we're actually going to use a brand new one that i just brought home that's right rather than do something with all the junk that i'm already hoarding i've gone out and bought more junk of course it only cost me six dollars in an auction so i really couldn't pass it up i mean it'd be criminal to let something like this go right it's a really cool looking dish this originally came from the roof of an abandoned gas station that was up for auction and all the contents of the gas station and all the garbage up here on the roof was for sale so i threw in a low bid i got it and then we had to get it off the roof somehow fortunately we were able to get it down get it onto the car and since i live pretty close by i just drove it home on the roof of the car so part of why i wanted this was this awesome mounting sled thing contraption that it's on this is going to go perfectly up on my flat rift house i don't even have to build a mount for it i just have to throw some cinder blocks on here and weigh it down it also seems to have this really precise aiming setup on it where everything is measured for the azimuth the elevation and even the tilt so that will really help me dial in specific satellites if i want to aim this at stuff it even has this little heating system to keep ice off of it although i don't know if that still works at all even the lnb or feed horn has aiming marks on it so you can fine tune everything now i don't know if this feed horn is good for anything apparently it's a huge network and this is a very early satellite internet system i believe this is actually a two-way satellite transceiver so it can both send and receive i'm probably not going to actually use that for transmitting anything because i don't have an account with any of these satellite internet companies and i don't actually know how old this thing is so it may or may not still work with anything that's around today it also seems like it's been up on the roof of that gas station for a good long time there's a lot of corrosion there's some little uh critter nests in here there's some kind of burrowing bee thing that lives in there so yeah this thing may or may not still function i think i can swap it out for some other l lnbs or feed horns and hopefully still use this dish for something else now so before i go to the effort of actually moving this heavy thing up onto the roof maybe i'll see if it picks anything up here on the ground we've brought out the old suitcase of satellite stuff so we can hook that up and see if we get any kind of signal out of this thing this thing seems to be already pointed at galaxy 19 or pretty darn close i don't know if it was just using a different transponder on there galaxy 19 is one of the free to air satellites so theoretically i should be able to pick up some free tv on the downside every time i connect it to my little satellite meter here this thing reboots and shorts out so either the cable is bad and has a short or the l b device up there has a short let's see if i can get this crusty old rubber gunk off of the cable and put a new one on here so under all that gunk it's actually a pretty standard in-mount antenna connector this thing's technically an internet lnb um some people on reddit said it should be able to pick up tv but i don't know how accurate that is and we're actually picking something up on it all right we can get um russian propaganda or something finally got some free tv it's uh kuwaiti sports again but uh hey it's something i'm pretty sure this is a saudi arabian home shopping network actually on this point okay so even though this weird rectangular internet dish is way better at picking up free to air satellite tv than my other regular round dishes free to air tv still seems pretty useless there's no actual content there's nothing actually worth watching on the free air satellite so i think i'm going to ditch the lnb feed horn assembly here we'll save it we won't throw it away but we're going to rip it off of here we've got our old homemade feed horn that we built last time when we were trying to do the goes satellite now this one is designed to slip into a standard tv dish so i may have to modify the mount a little bit or i might just zip tie this in place since it is made out of cardboard and foil tape it's not intended to be a long-term installation i just want to see if i can pick up the satellite and then we'll swap this out for something more permanent we're also using our amplifier and filter the sawbird goes we bought online and this is specifically designed to pick up and amplify signals from that geostationary weather satellite now that we're roughly aimed at the satellite we just need to fine-tune the aiming until we start getting a signal on gqrx here all right so we've kind of struck out completely on the goes geostationary weather satellite my little tin foil lnb here couldn't pick up anything i made a bigger lnb or i guess technically this is a feed horn because it's not doing any l b stuff but that didn't pick anything up either i even tried this uh 2 gigahertz wi-fi antenna which is more of a linear polarization versus circular and that did nothing either so i think maybe the geometry of that dish just isn't quite right for picking up goes satellites at least not with the feed horns and antennas that i've got so i think we're back to doing tv with it because it is actually really good at picking up the free air satellite tv stuff now i didn't find anything interesting on galaxy 19 i'm going to go ahead and try some other free air satellites and see if there's any good content on them over that way there's an nbc satellite so we might at least be able to get some national news maybe we'll try that one first okay i've adjusted the aim of the dish a little more and now we're actually picking up some channels and our thing rebooted again this little um gt media v8 finder it works but it it sure reboots a lot it's like it's barely able to supply power to the giant lnb thing on this dish all right so on this satellite so far we have car racing with no audio empty channels with nothing on them we have some gymnastics with audio but nothing's really happening got something really choppy with kind of a poor signal some more glitchy stuff got some kind of crime drama okay so nbc was kind of a waste of time as well unless you like car racing without audio so we are actually going to try the pbs satellite even though we're aiming pretty much straight at the house and the car here but we are actually getting something on the blind scans all right all i'm getting on this satellite is more preachers so i think i've got the wrong bird now [Music] all right so we've moved this ridiculous thing up to the roof where it can live alongside my other weather satellite downloader and my scanner antennas and wi-fi and i don't even really know what this one is i'm going to do another video on that guy i'm literally just storing it up here for now anyway we've got this sucker up here so now i think we've got a better shot at some of these low angle satellites so most of the channels that i want on this amc 21 are in the vertical polarization you can see by the shape of the feed horn and the overall shape of the dish that it's mainly trying to get horizontal signals that's probably why i couldn't get anything with the goes satellite because those i think are circularly polarized so anyway to get the vertical channels on amc 21 i have rotated the dish about 90 degrees all right well that's not the satellite i was looking for but this is actually super convenient it tells me what i'm aimed at so now i can try to offset over to what i was actually looking for [Music] from the atacama in south america all right i finally got some david attenborough finally something worth watching now we've even got cartoons on this one and a cooking show flavor all right so we're all done setting this up on the roof and i even have this antenna cable already up here which runs down and goes into my office on the side of the house there so i'm just going to hook that up and then i can set up a receiver in the office i still don't own a traditional tv although i have a lot of tv adjacent devices like this little meter kind of functions as one and i've got a couple projectors so can plug those into the hdmi output and watch tv on the wall over here all right that's about all i've got for this one i've gone through a couple phases of trying to do stuff with this particular dish i was hoping it would work for geostationary weather satellites but the geometry of the dish just isn't right for that so about all it can do is this free-to-air tv which honestly i probably won't watch all that often but i guess it's kind of cool to have the option if the internet's down or something you can check out some of my other videos for other satellite dish experimentation including little rv dishes and then in the future we'll be trying to do a little bit more with that big c-band dish so stay tuned for that thanks for watching we'll see you next time all right that's still not the most ridiculous thing i've hauled on the car but it's one of them

Channel: saveitforparts

Views: 359,349

Keywords: Satellite, internet, tv, free, fta, surplus, old, horizontal, rectangular, uplink, buc, lnb, pbs, diy, installation, roof, antenna

Id: 7JeGe2Gqswk

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 17 2022