Free Satellite? Anyone with knowledge, please help

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vvarrior

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Oct 21, 2013
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Utah
This question may be in the wrong discussion, but here goes:

My buddy took an HD antenna that he made out of copper wire and put it over the face of a dish network satellite that was on his house before he moved in. He unplugged one of the coax from the satellite and plugged it into the HD antenna. The other coax was unplugged. He scans his TV and gets over 40 channels. Channels like ESPN, FXMovies, AMC (subscription channels). He does not have a satellite box. According to dish network, his satellite is pointed at 110, 119 and 129 but he does not have service.

The channels he gets are 88-1 through 88-12, 89-1 through 89-12, 90-1 through 90-12, 91-1 through 91-12, 92-1 through 92-12, a few channels on 104. I have looked over the wiring to make sure he's not messing with me and he's not. Besides, he's way too cheap to pay for anything (always borrowing my stuff). The best explanation I got is that he's picking up another free to air satellite signal where he's pointed but I can't find a satellite with the channels he's receiving.

If anyone has ever heard of this, can you please chime in. I want to duplicate what he's got going on, but I want to understand it first.
 
Does he have cable internet by any chance? Likely his cable company isn't blocking certain channels yet and the tuner in the TV is picking those up.
 
If he's really getting subscription type channels and isn't just yanking your chain, somebody nearby probably is broadcasting their cable or sat feed illegally or accidentally in some way. His antenna is just picking that up. Or he's getting QAM channels from a internet cable feed.
 
vvarrior said:
This question may be in the wrong discussion, but here goes:

My buddy took an HD antenna that he made out of copper wire and put it over the face of a dish network satellite that was on his house before he moved in. He unplugged one of the coax from the satellite and plugged it into the HD antenna. The other coax was unplugged. He scans his TV and gets over 40 channels. Channels like ESPN, FXMovies, AMC (subscription channels). He does not have a satellite box. According to dish network, his satellite is pointed at 110, 119 and 129 but he does not have service.

The channels he gets are 88-1 through 88-12, 89-1 through 89-12, 90-1 through 90-12, 91-1 through 91-12, 92-1 through 92-12, a few channels on 104. I have looked over the wiring to make sure he's not messing with me and he's not. Besides, he's way too cheap to pay for anything (always borrowing my stuff). The best explanation I got is that he's picking up another free to air satellite signal where he's pointed but I can't find a satellite with the channels he's receiving.

If anyone has ever heard of this, can you please chime in. I want to duplicate what he's got going on, but I want to understand it first.
Click to expand...

He may well have a cable TV hookup somewhere in the mix. He is not getting ESPN, FxMovies , and AMC from OTA and he isn't getting it off of a satellite either unless he has an activated receiver. The channels lean toward cable TV as well. Did he just move in to this house? Sometimes it takes CATV weeks or months to get around to disconnecting their feed.
 
My money is on coming from the cable co also.

Here's how you have him "prove" to you...
1) Verify you see ESPN on one of the TVs.
2) Have him disconnect the line AT HIS DIY antenna.
3) Did ESPN go away? No? Then it's not coming from his antenna.
 
He did just move in, but our cable just filters out the channels. There is a chance there isn't a filter on there, but I think the only way signal is going to his TV is from the coax plug on the HD antenna.
 
The only way you could pick up stations like that over the air is if someone was illegally(or unknowingly) broadcasting the signal from their home.
 
So these channels aren't being broadcast over FTA... Which means I can't duplicate what he's got going on because I don't live near him. Interesting. I'm going to head over to his house tonight to figure out where this signal is coming from.
 
With the channel numbers you posted, for sure he is picking it up from catv. I get the same type here when I hook up to my internet only comcast cable.
 
Previous owner bypassed cable security? Or maybe left it running, forgetting to turn it off?
 
Are the channels nice and clear, or kinda fuzzy? Could be someone nearby has a real leaky cable setup, if it's kinda fuzzy. Or broadcasting illegally, though to receive them through an OTA antenna they'd have to be modulating it onto a carrier of sorts I'd think and probably would get caught pretty quickly if they were swamping the area with a signal that strong.

Probably he's just receiving it over the cable, even if his is an internet only connection with filters on it he may still receive some stations, or maybe it never got shut off.
 
With those channel numbers, it has to be unscrambled QAM from the cable company. Somewhere there is a line from the cable company combined in. In fact, if he isn't getting channel numbers below those high numbers, I bet the DIY antenna is doing nothing. I bet the previous owners cancelled Dish and got cable. The cable installers just reused the Dish cabling below, abandoning what was on the roof. The cable company then never disconnected it or installed a trap when they moved out, and fortunately for your friend, they leave some subscription channels unscrambled.

Guaranteed not to be FTA satellite. No TV has a tuner for that. And I doubt it could be a neighbor broadcasting, as most people don't have ATSC encoders. That can happen, but it would be analog signal (and thus no channels with dashes). QAM is the only reasonable explanation.
 

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