What was your first satellite you got when you started with FTA?

[stanleyjohn]

What was your first satellite and was it a easy time or a pain in the neck to get.
When i put up my first dish alittle over two years ago my first satellite was AMC6 at 72 west and the first station that popped up was the Gospel Broadcasting Network.RTV on 83 west was my second satellite and many more came soon after.It took me days to achieve success and it sure felt good when i got that first satellite.

 

[Magic Static]

After I bought my Twinhan 102g and figured what would be a good antenna. I put up my first FTA dish. Winegard 2076 on a SG2100 with an Invacom QPH-031 LNBF. I used an old echostar reciever and 13" TV to set up the dish. I went inside and fired up the computer and went for Galaxy 10 @ 123.0°W to get RTN out of Roseburg OR . A little more tweaking and a few days I had 20+ birds scanned in. A couple months later I was watching my home college football team from feeds and have been doing it that way ever since.

 

[Pixl]

I bought a new GeoSatPro 1100c and struggled for 4 days when I finally stumbled on CCTV News from China on 95w. Wow, my first sat signal! Quite a moment.

Notice the yard behind me is empty, it has 8 sat dishes today.

.

 

[markbone100]

Have to say the analog nasa channel on I think it was 87W. Had a 7.5ft winegard back around 2004 that was given to me. It wasnt even up on a pole, just laying on its side. It just happened to be at the right angle that when it was rolled around, nasa suddenly came out from the static and showed one of the live satellite views of the earth. I just happened to have the receiver on the right transponder. That was a moment of awe and surprise when I just got it by accident. Been with it ever since

 

[toucan-man]

97W. Took three days before the magic happened and I got a lock. That original 36" dish is still where I first mounted it, with about 1/5 of the dish blocked by the eve of the garage. But 97W doesn't seem to mind so I never corrected that.

Of course, once I had 97W I wanted more dishes, and quickly added Equity. Unreliable Sources -- now that was FTA television.

 

[Cham]

First satellite I picked up with my own equipment was Anik F1, and I think it was the video feed from the Canadian Parliament CPAC. It must not have been scrambled at that time. Took quite a while to get the angles all set up on the big dish, but once I found this satellite I could find the rest so it didn't take long to align things properly. Getting the H and V transponders and the skew sorted out was another challenge as I hadn't figured out how to reset the analog receiver, and the skew angles were really messed up!

 

[FaT Air]

99W for the Shepherds Chapel. To begin the BUD tune ups BITD. Yeah, it's 2 east of 'ideal' here, but that's easily close enough to start.
First digital, G3(I think) BITD. A Ku commercial data unit with a 1m offset CM or Prodelin dish.(I'd like to find one that's been orphaned) I actually 'cheated'. I'd hook up an analog to find CCTV, then twisted the LNB 90, then reconnect the data receiver. (the signal meter in the data receiver was a POS)
First personal DVB, to tell you the truth, I can't remember. Might have been 97W. (CRS?) Boy, was that first FTA receiver a POS compared to what's in the arsenal today. But then I found Pansat, and a 2700 was purchased, after a few yrs of mostly, inactivity.

 

[xtgold]

primestar retailer dish I got for free and echostar receiver aimed at 97w.At the time there was a tp close to the freq and same sr as dish tp 13.The receiver would show as skyvista service.Old echostar firmware would give a green signal lock on that.My first fun trying to get a primestar H and V output lnb to work.Later I got a primestar receiver and had to aim that at 85w by guessing.DTV had already bought them out so there were only a few barker channels left on 85w.The signal meter on primestar was backwards,a strong signal was 0 and no signal was 100.I was sitting on a cement block out in my garden with the dish, receiver,and b&w tv.Dish was mounted on an old wooden pallet so I could try different areas of the yard for aiming.

 

[wallyhts]

I got a free direcPC dish from office depot in Huntington, WV (thanks Andy). Bought a pansat 2500 and can't recall which sat. I have enjoyed this hobby ever since.

 

[truckracer]

Nimiq 1 with a Sony 18" single lnb old pizza dish. There were a couple news channels open.

 

[southofi-10]

123 when they had a ton of channels up.I believe it was equity broadcasting

 

[Cosmokramer11]

I had a winegard 76CM hooked up with a sg2100. Coolsat was the stb, I had some installer come by and I told him I want him to line up my true south which was 74W. I told him I want to lock on to ONN, he kept on asking me "why do you want a news channel for"?. So he couldnt lock on, I come to find out later, he could only lock onto Dish network satellites. So I kept on moving the dish via usals/1.2 and one day I locked onto 97W. I saw the steady green light on the coolsat and I was thrilled!. From then on I knew how many clicks I need to move the dish to lock on. I am able to get 61-127. I could prolly go for 58W but the roof gets in the way.

 

[Mr Tony]

91W for the in the clear audio channels and Canadian radio stations from Bell TV
1st KU sat? 95W for a college hockey game

had a fixed dish for 123W for years

 

[ACRadio]

It was way before the time of 99.9% of the people here, probably before a lot of you were born, but what an exciting time it was. The main satellites of the time were Satcom F1 and F2, and Westar 1, 2 and 3. Three of the four Comstars were launched but at the time they didn't have much TV, mainly analog long distance telephone calls for ATT (and that's a fun story in itself ). F1 and F2 were standard 24 transponder satellites, but the three Westars were 12 transponder sats. Westar 4 launched in 1982 or so was Western Unions first 24 transponder sat.

At 4.5 and 5 watts per transponder, a 10 ft dish had to be spot on for a watchable picture. Fractions of a db were very important. That's where dish alignment skills were honed. When Satcom F3R was launched it had 6 high power transponders (3, 7, 11, 15, 19 and 23...7.5 watts each) and they looked nice.

 

[chaskuchar]

fortunately 97w is my south bird. had a geosatpro 90cm dish, sadoun motor and geosatpro dsr200c. it was good till i figured out that ac3 wasn't good with the receiver so got the solomend/s9 receiver. great receiver. the only receiver i have seen advertized is the microhd that is comparable. glad to see the wait might be getting over. the solomend is taking longer and longer to reboot. power supply problems but once it gets wamed up, it works fine from 55w to 137w. plenty of channels available. charlie

 

[Martyn]

This probably won't mean much to most people on here, but the first satellite I picked up was Astra 1A. It was in 1989 and the line up consisted of four channels from Sky, MTV Europe, a couple of other English channels, four German TV stations and some scrambled stuff for Scandinavia. We'd grown up on three channels (four from 1982) so satellite TV was quite a revolution. The 60cm dish was fixed and for the family so I couldn't really mess with it.

A couple of years later I got an 80cm dish and built a motor system myself from two windscreen wiper motors. One controlled the azimuth and the other the elevation. There wasn't much else in English but Eutelsat 2F1 was an easy catch with Italian, Spanish, Turkish and some other channels. I could even pull in a sparkly signal from Intelsat 601 at 27.5 west of Discovery and CNN International. It was quite the DIY setup.

 

[eurosport]

My first one was 89w, on my original 1.2m white Channel Master, with my trusty old Pansat 2500a (my first fta box)....when we saw "ABC News Now" even my wife said "that's pretty cool!"

 

[joshrr]

My first sat was amc4 (prior to it being replaced). When i got a picture on history channel I couldnt believe it.

It was a motorized 100cm ku setup. Took a couple days mostly because i didnt fully understand what i was doing

Been an addiction ever since.

 

[Xizer]

PBS at AMC 21, after I assembled a Ku dish, set the elevation and LNB skew and headed out with it mounted on a tripod, it was a piece of cake. Had it locked and peaked within 30 minutes.

DishPointer and the SatHero SH-200 meter made it too easy

 

[Tron]

My VERY first FTA channel was NASA-TV, in 2005 when it was in the clear on 119W. That was just to verify that my equipment was working properly, and at the time I only had an old DirecTV single LNB dish.

I quickly rounded up a used 1 meter Channel Master and NPRM from a local satellite uplink service, and tuned my first Ku-Band linear signals from the Equity transponders on what was at the time Galaxy 10R at 123W.

When Equity went away, I re-aimed the 1 meter CM two degrees West to 125W, where it still sits today.