A SQUARE C-Band dish?!!?

[coinmaster32]

I've seen some odd ball dishes from the early 80s that were square, but they were homemade.

I've never seen anything like this.

 

[Bob2011]

That was painful to watch

 

[KE4EST]

Tell me about it.....

 

[coinmaster32]

I wonder what the story is behind this dish. I have never seen one like it.

 

[whatchel1]

OK he didn't lose much. For those of you that had never seen one of these they were the worse config of a dish you could come up with. From point to point they were a 10 ft. but from flat edge to flat edge they were maybe at max 7 ft(if that large). So really all it was good for was the 7ft. Noise was awful on them. Any TI at all would just destroy the signal(the outside 1/4 of a dish is mostly for TI and noise rejection). I took one of those POS down and replaced it w/ a 10 ft mesh and had a really happy customer. Don't know what they did with it. I didn't care either. That one was the only one I ever saw and glad of it.

 

[billmarc]

Well I had one of these somewhat square eight footers installed on April 1, 1982. It worked pretty well for a few years and I was able to pick up most of the programming available back then. I eventually replaced it with a solid ten footer that was fitted with LNBs that picked up both C and Ku bands. I was really dragging into work back then as I wanted to watch every last MLB backhaul game available as they were all in the clear. Those were the days. The guy that installed the dish had just got his business going in Indianapolis and wound up making a ton of dough. I can't think of his name at the moment though. One of the pictures that he took of my installation wound up in a commercial on Shaun Kenny's old satellite program. Back then everything was in the clear. Seeing that video brought back memories from nearly thirty years ago.

 

[toucan-man]

The founder of KTI still has one of these dishes at his estate, which now has a large and growing solar panel farm. Still has two C-band dishes, though. And one is square.

 

[bmcniel]

Yes, that does bring back memories. Especially since I remember installing one of those pieces of......you get the idea.

Those dishes were heavy as hell and after it was up for about a year, it drooped so bad you were embarrassed to go back to work on it. The guy who had it ended up leaving it on G1 and propped up the bottom with one of those wooden cable spools. That was the only one like that we ever sold. Switched to one piece fiberglass and never looked back. (and yes, I remember the Captain Midnight attack, I was watching at the time, dang I'm getting old)

 

[ACRadio]

The dish was most likely an Excalibur....