Anyone remember this from the Analog days???

[Cnut]

In the early days of Analog C-band sats,
There were no websites in those days telling you where to point your dish. What did you do? If you had PC with the old 5.25 inch floppy drives you did this...(I went to shed and retrieved this...see photos...


I don't know why I have kept this all these years, there are no computers today that could use this disc!

 

[FaT Air]

I have the DOS 6.0 disks and a computer to boot them. 8mhz w/TURBO 12Mhz (woohoo) - hasn't been turned on in many years. It's under a few inches of dust.
Friend has DOS running quite regularly to play their collection of games. (popularity is rising)
As far as setting up dishes, We got a chart from Doug of USS (United Satellite Systems) .. Also got a demo by him 'doing it' then had to do it ourselves. Then it was a tour of the manufacturing facilities and service bench. Orbit magazine, Sat Digest(?) and Coops publications were always near.

 

[Lone Gunman]

Yeah Phat, I've got some old hardware here also. There's two 5.25 floppy drives and several systems worth of pieces that I could use to put one together. Got a stack of those disks also that were used in the Nuclear Training Service I did years ago with Babcock & Wilcox. Those were the days!

 

[Cosmo Blatz]

Waaay back, I purchased a complete C band system from Skyvision by mail order. The only aiming aids I remember having were a compass, angle finder, and an instruction pamphlet from Skyvision. And on the second day of tweaking, I found the arc! What a thrill that was.

 

[migold]

Well, I see that I'm not the only one that could hook up a 5 1/4" drive to use the really 'floppy' disk. Still, I am enjoying these days, with the technology advancements that we have now....

 

[bpalone]

My main desktop computer has both 3.5" and the old 5.25" floppy drive. Neither gets used much, but do have them available and working.

As for aiming data, I had a program written in BASIC that I used to get the data. I didn't write it, but typed it in from a source I don't remember. There are some things I miss from the old DOS days, but there a lot of things I don't miss as well.

Went looking for a stand alone program to derive aiming data the other day and didn't find one available on the internet. Did, find how to calculate and was going to write my own program. Then decided to do it with a spreadsheet that is available in another thread here. Seems that with the internet, we are not supposed to need the ability to do it ourselves.

 

[FaT Air]

I cannot respond to the last line,bpalone, as all responses I come up with turn anti-political correct. Or may be seen as political. BTW: this is the 4th edit.
I'll just say, many times I see the smart phone out to add a few numbers or make change. It's a shame.

 

[Mr Tony]

very cool pics

 

[pacificrim]

Things these days have more of a 'magic box' effect where most users don't really know much about the technology they're using. I don't think this hobby is exempt from that but the Internet sure makes it easier to learn and I don't think my setup would be anywhere without it. I saw a brief thing about how the US ICBM system is still run on 5.25" discs.

 

[bigg t]

I got mine up and tracking from reading all the satellite magazines that were around in those days. In the 1980's those were plentiful. I miss the old On sat and Orbit publications.

 

[SatPhreak]

I also set my dish up with Orbit magazine and the manual for my receiver. I got it with a house but the actuator was broken and I first had to fix that first. I found a manual for tvro in the local library after I was tracking the arc and had the receiver all programmed. This was years before I had internet.

 

[wallyhts]

Wonder if you could still read the disk

 

[FaT Air]

I saw a brief thing about how the US ICBM system is still run on 5.25" discs.

Probably running COBOL
From BITD:
One station i miss is CHCH. Canada's superstation, as they called themselves. Don't really know if they really were, but it was part of their station ID. May have had affiliates coast to coast. IDK. Quick skim of the wikipedia page, looks like it's now nothing compared to what it was BITD (analog). All of 24 'channels' on a satellite. And 10° satellite spacing when I got the 'bug'.

 

[pacificrim]

Probably running COBOL
From BITD:
One station i miss is CHCH. Canada's superstation, as they called themselves. Don't really know if they really were, but it was part of their station ID. May have had affiliates coast to coast. IDK. Quick skim of the wikipedia page, looks like it's now nothing compared to what it was BITD (analog). All of 24 'channels' on a satellite. And 10° satellite spacing when I got the 'bug'.

Yes, I lived in Toronto and CHCH was a local indie OTA. They seemed to have a magic insight to programming, always picking the new shows that would prove to be hits.

 

[TRG]

I use DOXBox to run a few older DOS programs. Its an emulator that runs on most OS platforms. I use it on Linux and it works great.
http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1