Anyone own the huge satellite dishes?
 

Do people still buy these in the age of directv and dishnetwork?


If you owned one of the big dishes, did you have to pay a programming fee each month and could you get all the satellite channels including local channels out of state?

I still own one that's been out of commission for over a decade now; I don't recall when I bought it but it was somewhere around 1983. Nope, I didn't pay a thing to anyone in the early years of dish watching and had scads of channels to choose from, but by the time I made the switch to a small dish format in 1995 that had changed and the only channels still in the clear tended to be stuff I didn't want to watch. People were already paying programming fees by then for the movie channels.

my parents had a big dish before cable made it to their house, and the above post is pretty accurate, most of the "programming" that was still free was just weird/bizarre feeds of stuff....

back in the hay-day of satelite tv i used to watch primetime programming in the afternoon when it was beemed via satelite to the local tv/cable stations... my dad used to watch jeopardy in the afternoon (when i was at school), than we would watch it in the evening and he ALWAYS got every question right, i thought he was a freaking god until i figured out what he was doing!

Yes, you have to pay these days. I'd have one if it were cost effective for me. And if it could possibly pass the WAF factor, which it doesn't. They are still a useful option if you can handle it, but it seems like everyone I talk to with a BUD also has either Dish or DirecTV. (that's Big Ugly Dish, if you didn't know)

Re: Anyone own the huge satellite dishes?
 

I always wondered about this since I was envious of the people that owned them in the 80's.

Did people get cable channels for free back then and foreign channels and what did people watch?

Re: Anyone own the huge satellite dishes?
 

My friend has one but he gave up on it a few years ago. The analog reception had gotten very noisy and was very hard to fix. These were very cool when they were new since you could get all channels for free, but then they started scrambling and charging for them which led to this incident on HBO:

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