KA band news feed being tested back in Dec, 2012....

[N5XZS]

Other way to TV DX!!:

Here's the link!

http://broadcastengineering.com/eng/wls-tv-ktrk-tv-trial-ka-band-newsgathering-service

I wonder what bird they are useing though?

 

[FaT Air]

ViaSat-1 Ka-band satellite

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViaSat-1

 

[turbosat]

I followed some of the links to that story. Viasat contracted to build a satellite, Ka band back in 2008, it was completed and launched in 2011, went live in jan2012. At least one thing they use it for is selling satellite internet (may be connected to wildblue). It doesn't sound like that bad of a deal for sat internet, 12mb downlink, 3mb up for 50bucks a month, bandwidth metered between 5am-12midnight local time, and unlimited downloading between midnight and 5am! (that won't last long I bet) +++ 10bucks a month lease fee for the dish/modem, and a one time 50dollar activation fee. 2yr contract I believe it was. ::from their site, Exede ::
Carlsbad, Calif. – The ViaSat-1 satellite that powers Exede® Internet service has earned a Guinness World Records® title as the highest-capacity communications satellite in the world. At the time of its launch in October 2011 by ViaSat Inc. (NASDAQ: VSAT), ViaSat-1 had more capacity than all of the other communication satellites covering North America combined.

also said they already had signed up 200,000 customers for the internet service, and claimed that those customers reported 140% of the rated 12mb/3mb speed during peak usage hours, so far. [until they oversell it, that is] I"m almost tempted to jump on that, beats hell out of 1mb down/256k up with this rinkydink phone co dsl..

 

[Stargazer]

Even if this gets oversold it would still be much much faster than the previous satellite offerings. These new satellites and upgrades were very much needed in the satellite broadband industry. It is actually competitive to DSL other than the caps that they have. The caps may not affect some if they are not heavy bandwidth users.

 

[kittyhas1000legs]

Those speeds certainly beat my area's AT&T DSL speeds, but that data cap is a killer. Just yesterday I downloaded one show that was 5+ GB for the 13-episode series. I'd imagine streaming it wouldn't be much easier on my bandwidth. I would much rather spend the extra $10/month for half the speed and a 150GB cap (which I've yet to hit).

 

[rv1pop]

Hmm. I will need to check in on this. I am paying $40 a month for "unlimited" high speed!!!!! --- if you can call 0.98 Mb down and 0.26 Mb up, high speed...

 

[turbosat]

The way I read those ads, the monthly cap was daytime to midnight useage totals, it was saying unlimited from midnight to 5am. So if that is correct, just do your heavy downloading late, like I used to do when I had Direcway internet from DTV. *I bet they don't have ANY unlimited time on that system any more!

 

[Tron]

Staying under monthly data caps is harder on cable where the speeds are so high. I think some of the cable companies are going to have to re-evaluate their caps, considering that there are so many HD streaming sources that people watch these days.

Unfortunately, those services represent competition for them.

 

[Mr Tony]

Hmm. I will need to check in on this. I am paying $40 a month for "unlimited" high speed!!!!! --- if you can call 0.98 Mb down and 0.26 Mb up, high speed...

thats about what I was paying for DSL at my old location...and the speed was about that (the up was higher...a whole .5MB)

 

[truckracer]

My DSL is 768/128K and that is the fastest speed frontier can give us for 40.00 per month. On 4G Sprint I see 5-10 mb/s download but the cellular ping times are terrible. 300-500ms ping times on 4G.

At least my slow dsl has 47 ms ping times.

 

[turbosat]

After I read dslreports forum late last night to see what actual users said about excede, I don't think it would be any better than the direcway I had in 2003. High prices, low caps, onerous penalties, crappy customer service, websites that don't work routinely, etc etc. Broadband is a big racket. And we got off the subject , I think, lol.

 

[skysurfer]

Other way to TV DX!!:

i'm not getting too excited because a lot of things will have to happen to make any use of watching these kind of SNG feeds. Unless you are living in the city where the feed is, it's likely you won't be receiving the feed as the Ka-band downlinks are spot-beamed, not national or continental beams like the SNG feeds we watch today.

if you do happen to be in the spot beam footprint, then you'll have to figure out what IP stream is theirs (probably not too hard to find because your IP stream analyzer should show a longer time of higher bitrate activity than normal broadband users who probably just get data-bursts of high bitrate) and then you'll have to figure out if their IP stream can be cleaned up with existing software tools or if the format is different enough a new cleaning utility has to be developed.

 

[Anole]

back on subject

i'm not getting too excited because a lot of things will have to happen to make any use of watching these kind of SNG feeds. . .

Yea, at least!

And there will have to be experiments with motorized dishes, eventually.
I'm not expecting the first attempts to go well.
Not after reading the DirecTV Ka dish set-up instructions!