Newbie, no equipment yet..

[shellbelleboston]

Hey all, I suffer from DFS (displaced fan syndrome). I'm from Boston and live in Atlanta now and miss my local channels. My husband is from New Orleans and would probably have a massive heart attack if he missed a Saints game. We are currently Direct TV subscribers, only for the football package. After doing some research, it looks like you can pick most of the local affiliates on FTA! That is freaking sweet! So, can somebody guide me a little bit on what to buy and what bands I need? Here are the main channels we care about:

Local Boston affiliates
Local Louisiana affiliates
NESN (New England Sports Network)
Fox News (heard this was scrambled)
ESPN
FSN - North/South

I appreciate any suggestions.

 

[FTABman0]

to the Satellite Guys shellbelleboston!

I install for friends the M-1 FTA-DYNAMIC Satellite Choice Set from Sadoun Satellite one of our Gold Sponsors!

The M-2 Motorized DYNAMIC Satellite Choice Set is the best deal though for it adds the Wonderful Invacom LNB in the deal!

It comes with a HH Motor to hit all the possible satellites receivable in your area providing you have a clear LOS (Line of sight) to them all.

A 31” 80 CM KU Dish and the Fortec Star Dynamic Receiver possibly the best entry level receiver out there on the market!
It is easy to set-up and to get running just about out of the box!

You will get With the M-1 a very dependable Universal Linear KU LNB there with that system as well.



Help setting it all up is a post away here on the Satellite Guys Forums, we are here to help and enjoy helping explaining any questions you might have will have or just to chit chat!



There is so much stuff to watch up there I can’t describe how much fun owning a FTA system is! The guys here will contest to that with me!

I can just suggest what to get system equipment wise, I am not much of a sports dude other than NASCAR, keep checking your thread to see about suggestions on the channel updates that you may get ITC (In The Clear),

We don’t mention much here in the open forum about findings since that is how they get scrambled!

Someone will help you out there eventually so hang in there!

Sorry to hear about your displaced fan syndrome, we will try to remedy some of that for you!

Again, Welcome to The Satellite Guys US! You are in the right place for Everything Satellite!


K E V I N

 

[shellbelleboston]

Thanks Kevin, you rock! Thanks for the heads up everything, and the info. I'm definately going to check out that equip!

 

[Tron]

No New Orleans locals are currently FTA, although some have been in the past. Best way to catch games would be wild feeds, so you will want a receiver with blind scan. Welcome to the forum!

 

[shellbelleboston]

Thanks Tron! I heart this forum! I'm learning so much! Sucks about the NOLA channels

 

[turbosat]

None of those channels you mentioned are available for free on satellite, NESN used to be unscrambled, years ago, on C-band (was a big Bruins fan back in the late 80's !) but everybody wants MONEY now for the signal. If you found websites indicating all those locals and pay-channels are available for free, most likely they were hacker-sites advocating theft of signals. The hackers have perverted the phrase "free to air" to justify their theft of services. Free to air means free, unscrambled programming that does not require any special software or equipment to watch. You may find some of the sports events on various satellites from time to time, many are now in HD, which takes a little fancier receiver to view. Scanning the satellites and finding such things is one of the interesting parts of true free to air tv.

 

[Davage]

This isn't really in the scope of FTA, but Bell TV in Canada has the Boston channels for their set of US Networks. I don't know if the signal still reaches far enough down to reach Atlanta though. There is a Canadian TV discussion forum here on SatelliteGuys. Somebody there may know if the transponders that the Boston channels are on actually reaches that far south. Bell is a pay service though - basic service is about $33 Canadian per month (which is currently about $29 US).

Free-To-Air is a lot of fun too though. Hunting out sports feeds can be fun, but there are no guarantees that you will find your favorite team every time.

I have a combination of Bell TV, a big dish and a 39" Free-To-Air motorized dish setup.

 

[shellbelleboston]

Thanks Turbostat & Davage. I definately do not want to be Breakin' the Law, even if it is a kick ass Priest song *making devil sign with hands* Its hard to determine what is what when you are starting out because there are so many sights out there. Can you hook this up and keep a basic direct tv service? Is that hard to do?

 

[AcWxRadar]

Thanks Turbostat & Davage. I definately do not want to be Breakin' the Law, even if it is a kick ass Priest song *making devil sign with hands* Its hard to determine what is what when you are starting out because there are so many sights out there. Can you hook this up and keep a basic direct tv service? Is that hard to do?

ShellBelle,

Yes you can have both systems, but they are not mutually compatible with eachother so they must remain separate in regards to the hardwiring and dishes and receiver. This isn't too difficult. You can have your sub receiver sitting next to your FTA box in your entertainment center and just switch to whichever one you want at will.

RADAR

 

[shellbelleboston]

Thanks Radar! After lenghty discussions, NOLA boy isn't willing to give up his Saints games, and I really do not want to get stuck watching the Falcons (try being in the hospital for 9 weeks in GA during football season when you already suffer from DFS). I'm thinking we will downgrade the Direct TV to the cheapest package and get the Football package again and have an alt FTA setup. What do you all do for DVR? I'm going to have a spare computer in a few mos and saw plans to convert a spare desktop to a home DVR unit. Anybody here doing that?

 

[SatPhreak]

I use a FTA receiver that supports a USB hard drive for my dvr. There are quite a few models of receivers that you can add an external USB hard drive and are then able to pause, replay, or fast forward (until you get to the current live time). You can play them back with the fta receiver or plug the hard drive into your computer and play them on that.

Just today I started to try VideoReDo and after recording a tv show you can hit one button and it scans the entire show for commercials and automatically deletes them. Then you can save them back to the original type of file or save as a MPEG file or burn them right to DVD. It is quite a cool program.

 

[shellbelleboston]

VideoReDo sounds awesome!!! I hate going through all the commercials on a playback.