Social Feed

A Birdview 8ft perf Demo Trailer, owned by my employer. Wires run up to the second story apartment I lived-in. "Free" as long as I sold one system a month. Small rent if not. LNB (modified) Birdview original for "high block" use, late 1980's. Cost? Around 2-3k for the same system if bought and permanently installed. Receiver: an Echostar 4000 if memory serves. Simple IRD. Lower cost than the "bells and whistles" models from Houston Tracker and STS of the day.

Most memorable wild feed? I think the year was 1989.....It was a California Earthquake, and many a station was "live" with uplinks......wasn't that the one during a major sports event? I just remember seeing lots of anchored and un-anchored coverage. Enjoyed the PBS feeds back then, and the wild feeds. Have one VHS of "American Playhouse" (A walk in the woods) that I've never found on PBS channels ever again....online, or any video source. Excellent play.

Was in the days of the smaller movie channel carrier startups, too..and competing programming packagers.

Sorry the year's a bit beyond your request, best I can do......satellite wasn't part of my life til around 1986.

radio said:

A Birdview 8ft perf Demo Trailer, owned by my employer. Wires run up to the second story apartment I lived-in. "Free" as long as I sold one system a month. Small rent if not. LNB (modified) Birdview original for "high block" use, late 1980's. Cost? Around 2-3k for the same system if bought and permanently installed. Receiver: an Echostar 4000 if memory serves. Simple IRD. Lower cost than the "bells and whistles" models from Houston Tracker and STS of the day.

Most memorable wild feed? I think the year was 1989.....It was a California Earthquake, and many a station was "live" with uplinks......wasn't that the one during a major sports event? I just remember seeing lots of anchored and un-anchored coverage. Enjoyed the PBS feeds back then, and the wild feeds. Have one VHS of "American Playhouse" (A walk in the woods) that I've never found on PBS channels ever again....online, or any video source. Excellent play.

Was in the days of the smaller movie channel carrier startups, too..and competing programming packagers.

Sorry the year's a bit beyond your request, best I can do......satellite wasn't part of my life til around 1986.

Click to expand...

Do you remember what year Birdview went out of business?

Some of the earliest satellite equipment... Before LNB's there were LNA's. Lnas did not have the block down converter and used a huge RG-11 cable for the signal. That huge RG-11cable went into a block down converter. The original BDC's took power wires, and the newer ones got their power from the receiver.

Before the block down converter's a straight run of RG-11 went from the LNA to the reciever. That made the system costlier as RG-11 is much more then RG-6. I think some of the bird view receivers were that type.

I had a chance to get a bird view dish one time. Sadly the old lady wanted me to take the concrete too, no ands ifs or buts. The pad was some 3 foot in diameter and I think she said 4 foot deep. Nothing I own could of lifted it out.

A couple years later I considered getting the dish again but it was gone! The pole was cut off and the concrete left. Note: It was the only bird view I have ever seen in the area.

coinmaster32 said:

Do you remember what year Birdview went out of business?

Click to expand...

Not sure of the exact year. They tried to reorganize under "the new" birdview. (notice the dealer PR pic attached.) The man I worked for as a dealer used to keep me "in the loop" of birdview's progress business-wise, but my memory's bad on that. Had to be late 1980's or early 1990's. That man has long since passed away.

Their biggest mistake was not moving fast enough to adapt the established, "best in the business" hardware (outdoor) pack to be compatible with the IRD's that were showing up in the late 80's. They also did their own shipping, and costs were high for distribution for dishes that could not be disassembled. It's that same quality which may have been a hindrance back then that ironically makes them so desirable today.

On the positive side, they were way ahead of their time with their own receivers early in their existence, using electronic vs. mechanical relays, having multiple receiver and remote-control possibilities on secondary receivers that sent signals back to the main. Not to mention their "dual feed" so there was no polarotor, and a "horizon to horizon" mount that would not be limited by the length of the arm. Their earliest systems had bulky LNA's in their aluminum nosecones, too by the way. I've only run into ONE of those in my 20-plus year birdview "experience."

Hi, my story of the beginning years:

America is quite different from Europe. My first sat receiver was made by NEC and had only 8 station positions, similar like the presets of a simple car radio. No remote control, just a row of 8 manually adjustable push buttons.The offset dish and LNBF had the name tag of the Duch importing firm named Sonim, no idea what make they were. Nothing like a positioner or actuator were available to me in those days (1981), three satellites (Intelsat 27,5W with Mirror Vision and Premiere, two British pay-tv movie channels unencrypted for lack of people who own dishes, ECS=Eutelsat on 13 East with Italy, France, and some other channels and Intelsat 60 East with 6 German channels. I had painted three white lines on the roof so I could manually change the dish without any measuring equipment and I knew by head how to adjust vertical. After the first week I had seen all British pay tv movies for the month and so the other three weeks were spent switching between Europe and Germany (mostly public tv without any commercial interruptions).

C Band came a year later when a commercial exploitant lent me his 10 ft C-Band dish which had been mounted upon a trailer to visit fairs and cable exploiters. The reason? There was only one channel that we could receive on C-Band and that was on the Russian satellite Gorizont on 11 degrees west. A few cities had purchased a reception set from him, and many people were watching via their cable system the Central Television 1 program, broadcast from Moscow.

But these were cold war days, and in spite of the freedom that so often was hailed so much, pressure from Washington was strong enough on our government to cause for them to find ways to forbid the distribution of Russian TV. First they tried to get Moscow to state that their transmissions weren't meant for us but that didn't work because the Russians didn't mind at all us watching their tv program. So as far as I remember the next excuse was to claim that the entire C Band was illegal for private reception. Of course it was no problem for me having the dish in my backyard. The only function was to find a way to forbid distribution.

The dish was a 10 ft model, made of four glass fibre solid panels who strengely enough weren't meant to touch one another. Wide rubber washers kept the four pieces more than an inch apart from one another. More interesting was the fact that the whole thing was mounted on a beautiful cast iron base that had a base, broad enough to keep the dish in place without any further attachmens except for one wire that I attached as a security line during strong gusts of wind.

The feed and LNB seemed to be made of one piece but probably they could have been separated. But why should I? It worked, there must have been a teflon slab in it because the very strong Russian channel was on 3675 MHz RHCP but there was no need to change anything. Ample signal and no other C-Band stations available. The receiver was an Anderson 2010, a very good receiver but it lacked sufficient frequency range so it needed some technical manipulation.

A couple of years later I found out that I could recieve Central Television 2 on exactly the same frequency on 53 East, but that one had a couple of problems: weaker reception and a satellite that suffered of severe inclined orbit disease. Soon the same thing started happening on 11 degrees West and later 14 degrees West. Russian Gorizonts had a stable life of maximally 3 years before they went in ever more excessive inclined orbits. Some years later also 40 East was added. To combat these excessive incination problems eventualy I obtained a so called Hamcostar dual motor robot, which before had been sold in the USA under the name of NITEC. Hamco didn't live very long either but luckily a good friend of mine purchased the bankrupt mess and rebuilt the rather primitive Nitec/Hamco sets inro what is called the EGIS Robothead dual motor system which is not only programmable in many ways but also movable in increments of degrees. A special version later on made it even possible to get tv pictures of the Molniya satellite system with a set of 4 satellites broadcasting high above Canada and Siberia. But that last part of the story was all much later, in the 90's.

Later on in the 80's I noticed that Arabsat and also some Intelsats became vaguely available, so then I started with an 8 ft Winegard deep dish design which was marketed in Europe along with a C/Ku Seavey feed and a Drake ESR 4240 set of satellite receiver and positioner. The Drake receiver I've had to pick up at the end of the Cable & Satellite Exhibition in Wembley near London, the rest was shipped to my home. From then on I didn't have to go to the roof to adjust any dish on a daily basis. However the actuator always forced me to make a choice, either to get Britain on 27,5 West or to get Germany on 60 East. Both weren't possible with the range of the actuator that, by the way, still worked on the basis of a sliding contact. Reed relais hadn't been invented yet.

A last move at the and of that period was the reception of two tv programmes via the S-Band, quite forceful signals that were emitted from two Arabsat satellites, receivable by putting a special probe in a hole of the baseplate of my California Amplifier C-Band scalar rings. The big heavy S-Band LNB reminded me of the heavy earlierst C-band LNB's, same size and same weight. I don't remember when S-band was taken out of order, receiving it was of no use because they broadcasted the Saudi Arabian 1st and 2nd programme which were equally well available on C-Band at the time.

That's abou the best I can do when speaking of the period of 1982 - 1995 or so. Earlier than 1982 sat reception was done experimentally with home made gauze structures mainly by HAM operators during Easter conventions and such. Success almost guaranteed because 3675 was strong - so strong in fact that staying with a friend in his home near London we found out that just holding the open hole of the then 35 K Gardiner LNB gave enoug signal to stabilize the image of CT1 via Gorizont somewhat, and using the top of the aluminum trash can as a dish was enough to see the Russian tv in full color.

Now, with many 1000's of channels, I sometimes regret that those days have definitely gone. Now I can get anything from Peru to Kenya and from Korea to Russia or Nicaragua, but in essence what most countries broadcast now is in many ways the same. Culture has been almost wiped out and made place for games and telenovela's (soap opera's). I speak 5 languages and that helps me to access a bit more programmes and countries than most, but perhaps I'm only acting like a spoilt little kid :-(

10 ft BUD, (same one as I have today) 120 degree LNA. Houston Tracker IV mover, VonWeisse actuator(still working) Gillespie receiver. 24 channels, each adjustable via a trim pot from the bottom of the receiver. Oh yeah, back then there were far fewer sats. Spacing was 10 degrees. When everyone began scrambling, added a GI 2100 standalone descrambler to it. (70 MHz loop thru, Worked good. The Gillespie probably would fire right up today. Then a succession of GI and Toshiba IRD's. BUT, the Gillespie was pressed back into service during the first Gulf war, as it dealt with the PAL feeds better than the IRD. B&W and rolling, but I could see the video. If I remember, there were 3 sats east of 72 W, that I could get, with CNN and various other gulf war feeds. But not further than about 58W. I may have a few VCR tapes around here somewhere with some recordings.