What Happened To Those Huge Satellite Dishes?

I remember watching Falcon and the Snowman on cable and then seeing Captain Midnight's interception and color test pattern blasting HBO for encrypting their satellite signals...🤣
I was a kid but knew this hacker was AWESOME! 🤣

I have a video of a beach house from the 1990s and it has a huge ugly sattelite dish wrecking the beach view. Many beach towns banned those big ones in the 1990s. 12volt vids has an old video of a satellite installation in the 1990s watch it its fascinating

The ease of getting whatever you want on the internet and all pirate free pretty much caused the demise of satellite TV. I heard the rumour that when the internet dies it will be replaced with a satellite version. So hang onto those dishes people.

At some point people got suckered in to pay real money to watch commercials on TV and on top of that, edited movies. Nobody should pay for something like that.

My uncle Alejandro had one of these in Mexico and I will go to his house every Monday and Thursday respectfully to watch WCW Nitro and WCW thunder where my parents would send me away to Mexico for the summer

My dad had one, and something expensive on it stopped working so it just sat and rusted in the yard till he got a solar panel and popped it on to run their water heater. The dish he turned into a gazeebo.

hey here. does c band have large amount of radio music channels with lots of genres of music?

Like digital cable, BEFORE digital cable! In AL, where I am, we had them into the 90s. My grandparents and dad had them, as well as basic cable, or, “rabbit ears,” as we called them. Also, the paid satellite services,like Dish or DirecTV didn’t come in until the late 90s.

Why wont you pin my original comment? Or at least make a follow up video regarding the truth that these can and are still in use for Free to Air Channels and for Broadcast Purposes.

My parents neighbors had it back in the 80's

What happened to them? They went away and became smaller satillite dishes!

connected to data centre fiber optic internet

And it was fun to watch the wild feeds from the newscasters on location as they practices / screwed up their on-the-scene reporting...

The only problem with them as far as I was concerned was that channel surfing was slower since there were just a handful of channels on each satellite and then you needed to reposition it for another satellite to surf that satellite's channels...

I recycled so many of those dishes!

I remember hearing about “wild feeds for C-band”!

I use to install those systems as well as "modify" the VCII boards so customers could receive all the channels. One of the neat thing about those systems was watching the "wild feeds" where say watching Dan Rather do his news report then break for commercial except, you didn't see the commercial. Instead you would see Dan Rather digging for gold and pull out a big green winner. Yes that really happen. Ranchers would come in and buy actuator arms, the device that moved the dish across the arc, so as to install it on their gates to open and close them via remote control.

Miss those dishes. If you missed a show in your time zone you could catch it on the west coast channel. The bad was I caught myself constantly flipping through all the satellites because I was curious as to what was on.

They were replaced by high-speed internet. There, I just saved you 5 minutes.

We had one back in the day. See my family ended up smack dab in the middle of nowhere Iowa. So that thing became really the only way we could watch tv. Yes changing channels was an event. The “tv guide” was about the size of a phone book. Which basically just had coordinates for the different channels. While it was changing channels it would cycle through all the other satellites. If you saw something you wanted to watch while it was moving you had to quickly hit the stop button. Then pray you could catch the Chanel number or manually align it back to whatever channel it was. Good times!

I remember moving to a place in the 80s as a kid with one of the cband dishes.. we spent hours manually moving it and marking sats.. it was a huge waste of time hahah

PrimeStar was the satellite dish the folks on my road had in the 90s.

Spent alot of hours throwing a tennis ball at one of those. Hit the bottom side armed just right and it would throw it back.

Quality video. Thank you!

You can still use them today

The "Government" is one Karen you'll never be able to rid of 🤦‍♂️😄

I understand that many of these were bought by large Chinese restaurants for Stir fry rice in bulk. But I am aware of no evidence of this other than bargain rates on fried rice.

great video minus the host... Why are we using discount Luke for good videos? Give me effortless Riley instead.

back in the day, after HS football practice, I'd go with some team mates to the guy's (kicker/quarterback) house where it/his dad had that same size dish that took over a third of their backyard space and the best stuff to watch then/that time of day was the 'naked news' (literally) which also come from different European countries. Talk about keeping informed while staying dirty.

I grew up throughout the 80’s and 90’s in a very small town. I can remember several people having these enormous dishes. But they were beyond me. I understood what they were, but it wasn’t as if you saw advertisements for satellite TV back then. So it seemed like this thing you had to have inside knowledge on, or be really really techie. On top of having a lot of money for one. But even as we got into the 90’s, the small dishes started popping up, and most people just left the old big dishes up because they were a pain to remove. They became like some ancient archeological relics or something. I can remember as a kid in the 80’s though, thinking “Wow! They’re pulling TV shows from space!” That’s incredible! I’ve had a small DirecTV dish now for a good 13 years, but it hardly amazes me at all today that I’m pulling shoes from space. And most people don’t even use the small dishes like I do anymore. They just stream stuff. But I still like live TV, and having a DVR. I don’t know, with try hundreds of channels now, having something that’s already on when I pull up s guide, helps me make s decision. With streaming, I’ll scroll through things over multiple platforms for literally 45 minutes to an hour, unable to decide, saying “No, no, no, no, didn’t like it, no, not in the mood, no.” Crazy though, because when I was really little we just had a big antenna on our roof, and could only get literally 5-6 channels. And we didn’t have a VCR then either. So it was limited “Appointment TV” or it was nothing. Even when we first got cable, it was only 35-40 channels. Which seemed like a crazy amount at the time.

There came a point in time, when all you needed was a dish and you could grab the signal.

In the 1990s I had a motorized 12 foot dish...
I could watch most anything from around the world. It was amazing back then even though they were unsightly.

Used to install them in the 80's

They are still in use in Asia to receive C-band signals. Personally, I am using a 10 feet dish antenna to receive European TV channels from Hotbird, EuroBird and Astra satellites

I totally forgot these existed and never realized them being phased out.

F424

My dad had a huge satellite on a pole for his bar to show 1990s buffalo bills games that were blocked on cable

On cloudy days, and during storms, a lot of the paid channels were descrambled on C-Band. I watched a lot of free WWF/WCW/ECW PPVS that way in the 90s. Today's TV just doesn't compare to what we used to have, back when you could purchase à la carte directly from the networks.

I worked for a neighbor sophomore and junior summers I had probably installed 50-75 of the 12-8 foot antennas. The best part about having these was you got to see your favorite shows a few days ahead of time. The network would send the shows to the affiliates so they could splice in there local commercials. If you had a satellite dish they never showed any commercials.

My grandparents had one of those. And thanks for confirming that I wasn't misremembering seeing it move once

Wow! I had a buddy who’s dad was a 90s tech guy and he had one I remember watching Japanese shows and other far away countries in 98! Fast forward a few years later they used for outdoor junk storage

What would happen if u plug one to a dish/direct descrambler nowdays?

my aunt and uncle had one as well as a videocioher II so they got all the channels for free

I seen a solid one used as a roof on a gazebo. Also remember the movie Terror Vision?

OH MY GOD MY DAD USED TO INSTALL THESE MOTHERFUCKERS!

Scrambled and unscrambled pørn...that was the point of them

tv for free?! no wonder eastern europe was full of them

Yep, my friend's parents had an old satellite dish that they could still get some channels in the early 90s, but it went into disrepair and eventually got scrapped. It was nice while it lasted, you'd find the weirdest stuff on it such as random cable access stations or just raw feed broadcasts where the newscasters were just sitting around waiting to go on air or in between commercials and making small talk. We also saw a bunch or really odd and cool movies they used to play randomly at night, only years later I would figure out which movies they were, at least one was Re-Animator and another was Hard Ticket to Hawaii. It was fun while it lasted and it was the wild west of TV at the time.

I owned one, and they were magnificent. I could watch sports without commercials and it was like you were there. Still own mine and there are still channels i get when i go to Moms house where i first installed it. Morelos and Galaxy 5 were the best to get any movie for free.