Wen I first started out in this hobby, I got in on the tail end of the 123W happy times, and I agree there is less good Ku content now.
Same here. I went through MONTHS and months of growing pains and a massive learning curve before I finally was able to get anything working right.
I fought and fought to get White Springs on 129 and had a really tough time with it due to a loose pole.
![Eek! :eek: :eek:](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
When I finally figured it out, replaced the pole and got the dish aimed and tweaked, Whitesprings went bye bye.. :cry:
Same thing with Equity on 123. Same exact scenario. There was a lot of awesome stuff on there and for a very brief time, I was as happy as a clam at high tide..
![Big Grin :D :D](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
Then, yep. Same thing again. Bye bye...
Then RTV butchered their picture quality by dropping to from DVD resolution to VHS resolution and putting massively heavy compression on the video.
I fought for months to get C-band going by struggling with a mangled 6' dish (I mangled it) and it was a no-win situation. I was able to piece together a 10' C-band dish and make it work, amazingly enough.
That however has been working wonderfully for me!
Losing Bio and History on 101 really stunk. That was a good, long free ride while it lasted. Again, bye bye... *waves*
However for us rural folk with space for Big Ugly Dishes, there should be plenty of C-band feeds in the foreseeable future.
Thank goodness for my C-band!!
BUT, Darth Vader recently welcomed me to the Dark Side. I became a Dish Network customer, I now get the AT250 w/Blockbuster package, HD and DVR.
Even so, with all the channels, there's some stuff I can't get on Dish, namely MeTV, ThisTV, RTV and PBJ. I can get MeTV on a local OTA sub but the quality is not very good, the local broadcaster compresses it a lot so it looks pretty shabby.
![Frown :( :(](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
My dish tuner has a built in ATSC tuner and it will record ATSC and satellite to DVR.
![Big Grin :D :D](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
But I don't bother to watch MeTV via my local OTA source because of the low quality. So every night I switch from Dish to C-band at 10pm to watch The Twilight Zone and I watch MeTV the rest of the night until 3am when I switch to ThisTV to watch The Outer Limits, Highway Patrol, etc..
I can't and won't live without those two channels and the only way I can get them and get them with a quality picture is via my 10' C-band dish. So that dish is staying to the bitter end and it absolutely will be used a LOT, every single day.
I sure miss the day when there was so much stuff on ku that it was simply unthinkable to even consider subscription TV!