Anything worth watching I hook a FTA receiver to a Directv 5 LNB dish?

[piperut]

Hi Everyone,

Right now I have the HD package from Directv. I have the OVAL dish that has the ... well, it has three LNB's, but when you select the setup it is the 5 LNB dish (from what I understand, the 5 LNB's have been combined so that there are 3 physical pieces of equipment out on the dish).

I have two Directv HD receivers in the house. For various reasons, I have ended up with a projector in the garage. (Front projection with a tripod screen.) Most the time I park the cars in the garage, but I can pull them out, throw a couple space heaters out there (or a portable swamp cooler), and set up the projection screen so I have a large tv/movie/conference room.

On the oval dish, there is a 4 way splitter. Two of the drops go to the hd receivers in the house. I could drill a small hole in the wall of the garage and drop a cable from the dish into the garage. I see some of the less expensive FTA receivers are around $100.

If I drop a cable from the dish, is there going to be anything worth watching on FTA?

The other choice - drop the cable, and when I want to watch something (large groups of people over) take one of the receivers out and hook it up.

I am not sure which would be best, and I am not really sure there would be anything worth watching or not on the FTA if I did that?

Thanks in advance,

roland

 

[turbosat]

No, you won't get tv from directv's satellites, they are scrambled, and in a format that isn't watchable by free to air boxes. Not sure if any of your lnbfs are linear, probably not, but unless you move the dish over to a linear satellite and get the right lnbf on it you won't get anything.
You really need a 30" or larger dish, linear lnbf (pay-tv uses circular lnbfs) and aim at a linear sat to get any free to air tv. Click on The List, top of the page here, to check out some of whats up there. *You'll need to keep it separate from your pay-tv setup, switches incompatible and would possibly mess up your DTV boxes.

 

[olliec420]

even with circular lnbs if you were to point at fta dvb chans on the birds available you will get about 3 channels and the spacing is probably not right. if it is the transponders may be blocked by the d* lnb built in switch. scrap it get a 36" to 39" with a linear as turbo said, i know sat AV has a sweet eBay deal right now

 

[gillham]

You should be able to pickup NASA TV off EchoStar's bird at 119. You have to turn 22Khz on to get the 110/119 "combined" LNBF signal. I believe that was called Sat B & Sat C, at least on the older Phase III. The NASA transponder happens to work on the combined setup.

But... I doubt you want to pay $100 just for NASA TV. Get a 36" dish as suggested if you want FTA channels.

 

[B.J.]

You should be able to pickup NASA TV off EchoStar's bird at 119. You have to turn 22Khz on to get the 110/119 "combined" LNBF signal. I believe that was called Sat B & Sat C, at least on the older Phase III. The NASA transponder happens to work on the combined setup.

But... I doubt you want to pay $100 just for NASA TV. Get a 36" dish as suggested if you want FTA channels.

I agree re the NASA. I've done that with my DTV dish. The dish pulls in both DN and DTV. Seems like there was some religious channel last time I looked too.
Also, if you get a Twinhan 1020a PCI card, it can also receive the unencrypted audio from any DTV channel if you get an audiorip plugin for TSREADER. I often use it to "listen" to some talk shows where you don't really need to see the video, plus there are the music channels.