cool sat 6000? FTA satalite? Free cable? What is it? how good is it? how does it work?

Question

my friend bought a coolsat reciever the other day and said he gets free cable. i did some research and i heard its possible to watch certain channels that are completely free and legal, which is what i wanna do? can someone please help me understand how it works? how much? what is it? how good is it? pros and cons?

Answer 1

Yes there are certain channels which are completely free. Coolsat is a maker of FTA (Free To Air) receivers. There are many others, too. As well as set top boxes, there are also PCI cards you can use to pick up FTA satellite on your computer and use it as a DVR, there's others capable of getting free HD or are PVR's in themselves too. For the PCI cards you're looking at about $50 for the card. The set top boxes are about $100 and up although $150 ones are good enough for most people. The dish, you should have at least a 30" offset feed dish to get anything decent. The bigger the better! You'll need an LNB too, like a 0.3dB noise figure linear LNB is real nice. Many dealers are putting together packages with all the equipment you need together for $200 or so. You'll probably want to get a positioner as well to point the dish if you want to pick up channels off of more than one satellite, unless you feel like going out and pointing the dish every time you want to change sats.

What channels can you get? Hundreds upon hundreds! Check this out:

http://www.lyngsat.com

This webpage is the FTA person's bible. Just look under frequencies and click on your continent. You will then see a list of satellites. Ones that are green are Ku band. They take the 30" dish. Ones that are yellow are C and Ku. The C channels require a 6 foot dish or bigger, so only the Ku channels apply. The pink ones are C band only. The white ones are a completely different band than used for standard sat TV so ignore them. Now pick a satellite, preferably one that looks to be close to you (as they could be aiming their signal somewhere else!) and click on it.
Now, on the left you will see some numbers. If it is 4 digits and starts with a 3 or 4, this is C band. Ignore unless you got a BIIIIGGGG dish! If it's 5 digits and starts with a 1, this is Ku band and you can get it! All the light yellow stuff is unencrypted. That means FREE! FTA receivers only pick up DVB so if it says Digiciper or anything else besides DVB, you're out of luck. They usually only put what it is once per transponder so look at the first entry for that transponder (frequency) and see if it is DVB or not. Sometimes there will be a package and you have to click on the P icon to see all the channels. The light green ones (quite rare) are FREE HD channels. The orange ones are scrambled :(. The rest are analog, scrambled HD or data like satellite internet. The last thing you want to check is all the way at the right next to the persons name is a blue hyperlink which shows the satellite's coverage area. Make sure the signal covers your location or you may be looking for a signal/channel in vain. You will see that there are so many channels you can get!

You can also look up channels on the main page there by clicking on Free TV and searching by country. That way if there's a station you're interested in, you can tell what satellite it is on. This brings us to the cons. You're not going to find premium movie channels up there for free. Sorry. There are a lot of entertaining channels, but the really good ones they want to make money off of so PPV and stuff like that you'll have to subscribe to someone for. Some FTA boxes will take access cards and let you subscribe but most will not. If you're in North America and you only speak English, you're not going to find a heck of a lot of channels that float your boat. Most of the programming is in foreign languages like Arabic. You can still get some PBS stations, PBS in HD, WB, MY tv, ABC, FOX, NBC if you have 4:2:2 capabilities, a lot of religious channels, Al Jazeera English, Russia Today (english), GOL TV, NASA, a channel that plays old black and white movies, RTN, and others. Don't expect MTV, VH1, TBS, HBO and Cinemax. If you're in Europe, there's loads of free stuff out there and it's definitely worth it no matter what language you speak. Just look at Lyngsat and see what channels are available. You'll definitely run into some you've never heard of before, but Lyngsat has links to their homepages so you can see if they look interesting to you. If you see enough channels that you like and you think it would be worth the couple of hundred dollar investment then go for it. Just remember any of the free stations could move, change or disappear at any time, and often without warning. This doesn't always happen, but you never know if they're going to start scrambling your favourite station or take it off. This happened to me with The Tube TV Music Television. They moved it to C band and I don't have a dish for that. The ImaginAsian Anime TV channel went away on me too.

I do it as a hobby and I have a lot of fun with it. You can run into all sorts of interesting stuff, especially if you have a receiver with "blind scan" which finds the unpublished stuff, like live sports feeds, news remote cameras so you can see what the reporters do when they don't think anyone is watching ;-)

Answer 2

There are two types of co-ax cable. Analogue TV has a thinner core type and digitial has thicker copper core and better screened outer. Power is sent down the thicker copper core for digitial TV. To power remote eyes and your LNB on the dish. The analogue cable is not geared up for the power side of things. If it's just from an Aerial then both would be fine.

Answer 3

damn not first post. and yea i did a lil bit o research and at the coolsat website i learnt that you do get some free channels. just buy a coolsat top box like the Digital Satellite Set-top Box 6000 premium.