channels hardware?

Question

Which is the most cheapest hardware or any thing like this from which i can watch all the world television channels????
Or how much cost of a decoder???
Or any best digital receiver which can get all channels by frequency?????

Answer 1

I'm assuming you're talking about a FTA (free to air) satellite receiver, yes? There are some pretty cheap models out there. It all depends on what features they have. The cheapest seem to be the PCI cards that you use in your computer. You then watch the channels on your computer or if your video card has a TV output, you could hook it up to your TV. Besides the price factor, there's also a couple other advantages to using a PCI FTA receiver. One would be that you could turn your computer into a virtual digital video recorder, like a Tivo so you can record programs in perfect quality and you're limited only by the size of your hard drive. You can then later burn them onto DVD's if you have a DVD burner. Another advantage is that if you have the proper codecs installed on your computer, you can tune in 4:2:2 feeds, decode dolby digital sound and even watch HD programming if your computer is fast enough. Most set top boxes (STB's) will not receive 4:2:2 and the ones that do cost a lot of money. Same goes for HDTV as you're looking at around $600 for that. Dolby digital capabilities are more common but not guaranteed to be in your STB. If you catch them right on eBay you can get them for around $60-$70. Hauppauge and Twinhan are brands to look for in PCI FTA (DVB-S) receivers.

A set top box these days will run you around $100 for a cheap model and go up from there. The most expensive have built in hard drives, HD capability, Dolby Digital, etc. A feature to look for is Blind Scan. This is great for finding channels that aren't announced anywhere or if you're just too busy to look up a channel map and program it all in manually. You just point to the satellite and it finds all the channels on its own. No entering in frequencies, symbol rates and all that junk; it just finds them. It can take around 20 minutes per satellite so don't expect it to be instantaneous. It differs per model box, too.

Next thing you'll want is a dish. At least 30" is recommended. The bigger the better but 30" will do for most satellites. Galaxy 25 (formerly Telstar 5/Intelsat Americas 5) has the most free international/world TV channels on it and 30" is fine for it. A suitable dish would be an old Primestar dish. These can still be found for cheap or free around the country as they've gone unused for almost a decade now and many still have them in their yards. eBay is also a good resource for any FTA equipment. The only other things you'll need are an LNB (make sure it's linear not circular!) and coax. The lower the noise figure on an LNB the better the reception usually. A 0.6dB or lower is generally good enough. You shouldn't have to spend more than $200 for everything.