This is why it is good to stay current with the news!!
Supply and demand folks. Believe me, I had wanted to buy a 6000 for ever on ebay, but the prices were so damn high. $500 for one! But once those HD channels were swapped to N2, PLUMMET! Picked one up for $125. Same with DishPlayers. My originial unit was a 7200. After getting into HD I sold that sucker for like $250!!!! Dish had given it to me when I signed up like 5 years ago. Now you can buy a 7200 on ebay for $20. Its just the way it goes. I wish I had bought a case of FTAs a few months ago when they were trying to get rid of stock. I have no problem charging a hacker top dollar for a box hehe.
I see a lot of people on here lump "testers" and "freeTVers" in one boat. The testers, imho, are still within the old definition of a hacker. They love learning a technology, figuring it out, etc. The ones that take their knowledge, and SELL it, are gonna be getting a knock on the door some day from the feds or RCMP. Same with the freeTVers who BUY it. No clue about what N2 N1 or whatever is, they just want it for free. They dont care about the technology.
I mean, a big reason I got into satellite in the first place was the "cool" geek factor. You got this dish pointed out in the sky, and some how a RF signal is being beamed from miles away in space. So cool. Of course, like many here, I wasnt just satisfied with one dish. Research, learn, read. Hows it all work? Lyngsat,etc mmm.
Thats why I got into FTA. I actually have a use now for the 3' dish i bought way back when 105 was gonna have HD. I didnt know what I was missing. Thanks to all the helpful info on here and other sites I got it up and running, amazing whats up there. I'm now in the mode of trying to automate pointing the thing cuz its a pain to go out there and change satellites heh.
What I dont get is why Dish keeps going back to Nagra? I mean, these same cards are used throughout europe. Such a large user base means a large hacker base as well. The fact that the N2 cards had been out in europe for a year or so before dish started their swap to them was also a bad move. If they had forced Kudelski to come up with a different set of cards for Dish, I bet the swap would have worked. For now, its back to the same old N1 cat and mouse game..
Two points on the mpeg4 and dc2 suggestions. Is there a chip that will decode both N2 commands as well as dc2? If they ever changed, it might require dish to use two smartcards or chips while in transistion (cost big time $$$???) I think mpeg4 might stop the FTA physical boxes, but hackers would transition to dvb-s cards where, Im not sure, but I would think it would just require a codec to decode, since the low end cards use software decoding.
I do wonder why some people on here take it personally? I see comments like "oooh boy, i hope they hit those hackers hard!" I really dont care either way, it doesnt affect me. If Joe wants to go out there and buy an illegal hook up, oh well, thats his decision. He better be ready for the consequences (legal, no tv, wife hating him for no tv, etc). At the same time, I'm not exactly cheering for a billion dollar company who poured millions into an outdated smartcard system. I would wager the revenue lost from the hackers who would have paid instead of steal is a lot less than whatever they spent on 12 million new cards and uplink encryptors.
And with that, I step off the soapbox hehehe.
as it will only be useful to TRUE FTA-er's.
