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 :-(
