Re: Re: Sky+ Press Release and Info (Info about the US system)

[Jonathan Bradshaw <jonathan@xxxxxxx>]

Before I moved back t  the UK I lived in the US and had
"DishNetwork".
With a "normal" single dual LNB you would have two cables from
the dish
t  a small "splitter" box which would then allow you to connect
up to
four receivers to it giving each box both polorisations. This wasn't
entirely cheap but worked nicely. Generally this was combined with a
diplexer to also distribute the aerial too. (Btw, additional receivers
were fairly cheap and it only cost a few bucks to get the programming on
all your boxes) If you had one receiver, you obviously didn't need the
magic box -- just the same method as is used here in the UK.

Then Dish upgraded to "Dish 500" (with 500 channels of
programming
supposedly), this was a slightly wierd looking single dish with two
physical dual-LNBs (one pointed at each of the two birds at 110 and 119
orbital slots) and a total of FOUR cables coming out (2 birds with 2
polorisations). You then needed a rather more expensive box that would
take 4 inputs and up to 8 or 12 receivers could run off that (with each
receiver getting all channels on both birds). Of course, if you just had
one receiver, you could use a simple box that took a single LNB feed
from each bird and sent it down to your box.

For those of us really crazy people, they had a third bird at somewhere
around the 65 slot and yes, we could actually get a single receiver to
have three dishes hooked up at the same time and a LOT of programming!
(still nothing worth watching) That was the bird they stuck the NASA
channel (along with foreign programming) and was the sole reason for
most of the techy folk doing it.

I really really miss my DishNetwork box. I had on screen guide with a
week of programming, point and click recording & reminders for future
shows, dolby digital and now HDTV and although they had problems when
they first started using stat-muxes, the compression was minimal (2
birds gives you a whole lotta bandwidth) and on the movie channels they
had the widescreen, dolby digital etc. in what was as close to DVD as
you could get. They also need monthly live call-in interviews with the
CEO and quarterly call-in "tech chats" (don't see Sky doing
that...)

Anyway, since I can't have my old toys and now I must use Sky, anyone
tell me where I should get FT100/125 cable from (I did learn not t  ask
for RG6...)? I need to wire up the house I just bought. Maplin have it
at nearly 1 UKP/meter or Screwfix at about 10p/meter!

Lastly, I'm typing this on a laptop in my living room (cause its cooler
down here, don't get me started on the UK's lack of AC) using a 802.11b
card (t  a linux router to a Cisco ADSL router). Wireless is great! I
didn't figure it would work well. I was very wrong!


Mark Pollock wrote:

> With dual LNB, dual cable and dual tuner, can you watch two different
> channels at once? The press release only mentions recording another
> channel. If not, has anyone heard of any enterprising individuals
> looking to "engineer" such a solution. By enterprising, I
mean the
> sort of bloke that supplies gold cards for onD  boxes etc ;)
>
> Mark Pollock
>





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http://www.automatedhome.co.uk
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