Recently, I was told that the FTA hobby was specifically for a certain type of person! I was even told that with regards to C-band all the hardware you need to get started with can no longer be obtained and that one needs special technical skills to repair hardware no longer commercially manufactured for the consumer market.
Is the FTA hobby really for a specific person possessing a specific set of skills?
I must say I find it a bit funny, or maybe ironic, that a ham radio operator would be posting this, given that many hams have held similar attitudes toward non-hams that dabbled in any kind of technology. I am old enough to remember how contemptuously some hams viewed CB radio operators back in the day, and how many of them wanted to hang onto Morse code requirements as what they termed a "lid filter" to keep the riffraff out. A group of them in one city I lived in also helped destroy a local computer club that I was a part of (it didn't have enough rules for their liking, apparently). I'm not saying you are like this, but it was hams that killed any interest I had in ham radio back when I was much younger, despite the fact that some of my friends had ham licenses.
But to directly answer your question, no, the FTA hobby is not nearly as exclusive as ham radio is (or at least used to be 20 or 30 years ago). All of the hardware you need can still be purchased, and in the case of receivers often at a fraction of the cost of what they used to be back in the day. But the downside is that so many of the former U.S. suppliers of this equipment have gone out of business that your choices are somewhat limited. For the dish, it is best to find one that's no longer being used and see if you can buy it (sometimes people will just give it to you to get it out of their yard), just make sure it's not severely bent or damaged or rusted out first (though sometimes a rusty rim can be fixed with auto body filler). Receivers are sold on eBay and Amazon but try to get one that's well rated; I think there may also be dealers in this forum that still sell them. Beware of other sites where they bought a pallet of substandard receivers ten or fifteen years ago and are still trying to unload them, you want a receiver that will at least receive DVB-S2 and (preferably) DVB-S2X signals and both 8PSK and 16PSK (16PSK signals are not as common and are harder to receive, but they are becoming a bit more common).
The real problem nowadays is getting good LNB's, especially for C-Band. If you can't find any from a U.S. seller you may need to try something like AliExpress. If you are in a northern climate I advise against buying any PLL model with cooling fins because they have a nasty tendency to stop working when the temperature drops to a certain point just below freezing, and having PLL doesn't really seem to help in my experience. In my opinion some of the newer LNB's are better than the ones we used to use a couple decade ago in that they will work with less available signal strength (which is a good thing if you are trying to receive a 16PSK signal), but the downside is they don't seem to last as long, although that varies from unit to unit. Then again they cost a lot less than they used to and you don't have that damn mechanical polorotor to that liked to die in the dead of winter anymore (polarity is switched by voltage on the coaxial cable now). Speaking of cable standard RG-6 works fine but you do want waterproof connectors for any outside connections. One more thing about LNB's is if you are buying new you may want to buy ones that are resistant to 5G interference, I think they are more expensive but may be worth it if you live in an area where there is 5G interference. As far as I know this hasn't yet been a problem for me so I cannot comment on that.
As for aiming the dish, there are web pages about that and it is good to have a satellite meter of some kind to help you tune into the satellites. There are also applications you can load on your mobile phone (some free, some not free) that supposedly will show you where the satellites are in the sky relative to where you are standing on the ground. Those are not all that accurate, they will get you sort of close but don't rely on them for pinpoint accuracy. The advice I have always given is to try going to your public library and see if they have any books on home satellite installation from back in the 80's or early 90's, because those often gave a good explanation on how to aim a dish. You can ignore pretty much EVERYTHING else in the book except maybe the part about physically setting up the pole and dish, because none of the other equipment will be the same because those books were from back in the analog era. Receivers will be different, and you probably won't be using a legacy LNB. If the dish came with a dish positioner that lets you move the dish across the satellite arc, and it's not completely frozen up from rust, you may be able to get that working again but be aware that newer receivers don't usually contain the circuitry to supply power to or control such a positioner. Also, if the book mentions any specific satellites or programming on those satellites, those are long gone and everything is digital now.
There is quite a bit to learn with regard to FTA, and it might have been somewhat easier to get into it ten or fifteen years ago where there were more equipment suppliers still around, but it is certainly not impossible to build a working system even if you buy everything new. Also, please understand that you cannot use a C-Band system to watch cable channels anymore, and that if you are wanting to watch early feeds of syndicated programs, many of those are now being delivered to stations via the Internet rather than via satellite and I expect that trend will only increase. So realistically, if all you are wanting to do is watch some TV, it may not be worth it to set up a satellite system anymore; nowadays you can find a lot more content on the free ad-supported streaming services anyway (like Pluto TV, as just one example). I put a lot of time and effort into my setup and it is disappointing that channels keep going away, or switching to hard-to-receive formats, and then there is always the possibility of future interference from 5G transmissions, so if I were just starting out now I'm not sure I'd do it all over again. I am happy that I have my setup and that it still works for many channels but I miss being able to get the high quality NBC feeds and the early CTV feeds from the Atlantic time zone, just to mention a couple of things that have gone away in the last year or two.
