Sorry about that. Sometimes a little humor can go a long way.
So many fads come and go throughout the years. That is the humorous point I am making.
Seriously, I am afraid that the FTA hobby may eventually end up. say, like the computers.
The computers hit the market, alot folks buy one, and within a few months...
their computer becomes obsolete. Newer, faster, and God knows what else computers comes out.
I see some of that in the FTA market. New and fancy receivers get on the market, and before long, the receivers we already have would become obsolete. Then it would become harder to upgrade the old receivers and so on.
Maybe FTA is safe right now. I am using my Pansat 2000v that is probably 4 years old and I can still get the necessary factory upgrades to keep me going.
I met fellow FTA guys that still use the old receivers they bought back when FTA first got started. They don't mind manually punching in the TP and frequencies to get the channels they want. The receivers were dependable then, still dependable now.
I reckon the key is to buy a FTA receiver (and necessary accessaries) from a dependable companies like Pansat, Viewsats, etc. That way, we can still get the necessary factory upgrades to keep the receivers going. It can get expensive trying to keep up with all the new technology offered. Some folks got the money to keep up, while most of us just make do what we have.
As long as the "free to air" mean free to air, then no matter what receiver we have, we shouldn't worry.
As long some Bozo in the FTA field doesn't decide to put the free to air channels into another format, forcing us to buy new equipment needed to encode that format of free channels.
That happened with the C Band satellite systems. Soon there will be no more analog channels since C Band is going digital. We have to buy 4DTV receivers to get those digital channels.
To that guy asking if it is worth it to go to FTA , YES! It is worth it if you really want to expand to more channels. Like anything else that comes and go, it will be best risk to take.
I am glad I took that risk!!!
Of course, aside from being VHF, they are by far the weakest station locally 
