Prep Comms - FTA Satellite for Preppers?

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

FTA Satellite is not what it once was, but it's still a viable alternative to paid TV especially if you're interested in news with different views. In this episode Caleb discusses the benefits of FTA Satellite and why a prepper may consider adding it to their communications plan.    Although FTA satellite systems have largely faded from mainstream use, a small community of enthusiasts remains committed to preserving this technology. They emphasize its unique ability to access international programming, which has kept a niche audience engaged, particularly among those interested in content from different languages and cultures. For a time, this interest sustained the FTA community, but the rapid growth of streaming services soon eclipsed these efforts, pushing FTA further into obscurity. While FTA satellites are no longer widely used, some hobbyists still refurbish old dishes and exchange knowledge online. These dedicated individuals continue to discover unencrypted feeds and network programming through FTA systems, even though the widespread availability of internet-based content has greatly diminished the demand for such technology. Is there a place in your comms plan for FTA Satellite? For me? Yes.   The #1 place to learn more about FTA Satellites: Satellite Guys Forum The Best Place to Shop FTA: HyperMegaSat FTA Satellite on Amazon: K4CDN Store Mentions: KE4EST

Well, not too many days have passed since my last time with you. Thank you for coming back to the PrepComs podcast. My name's Caleb Nelson. My amateur radio call sign, if you're interested, is Kilo 4 Charlie Delta November. And that was my computer, whom I forgot to mute. Sorry about that. Yeah, I'm a ham radio guy. I have been since maybe 2011, I think, the spring of.

Before that was a CB radio guy. Before that, shortwave listener. Just kind of roll it all in together. I am a communications nerd at my very core. And some people say it's actually a geek, and some others call it a nerd. I think that my children would probably say nerd and maybe some of my peers would say geek because neither one of them really know the true definition. And that's not why we're here. Why we're here is to continue the conversation about

communication methods, solutions, reasonings, and whatnot for those who are preppers. Or maybe you're not a prepper. You're just interested in an alternative means of communication. If your telephone quit working and you wanted to talk to your mom, at any level, anywhere in between any of those, you found your place. You found your guy. And here I am to be able to sit down and chat with you about what is another means of alternate communications for intelligence gathering. That sounded weird. During an event. So if you're a prepper,

you're prepping for something. And we've gone through the power of an AM FM radio, a weather radio, a shortwave radio, a scanner, all these things, we've covered all these bases. And I've got one more, one more type of intelligence gathering device, or if you just want to be kind of boring about it, something to listen to. I'm going to stop on the listening to's after this show, and we're going to get into the talking to's as we progress further. But I wanted to put this in here because it's something I think a lot of people are completely unaware of, and it's not necessarily the tool it was 10 years ago. It definitely is not the tool that it was 40 years ago. But I think that if you've got the time, you've got the patience and the desire, a free-to-air satellite system may be something that you need to look into.

Now, I'll tell you, first off, free-to-air satellite, or most of the time you're going to hear it called FTA, free-to-air FTA satellite. these can be the dishes like your great granddaddy had back in the day up in the mountains of West Virginia. It was about 10 feet wide and he had a huge motor connected to it and he would tune it around and he wouldn't let you turn it on after dark kind of stuff. Uh, that was back when satellite was kind of, um, it was a new thing, a new technology for consumers. They were very expensive, you know, two to three grand back in the late 70s. And you could buy a brand new really nice car for 10 grand.

So not very many people invested in these things. But if you did, you could kind of pirate or skim off a lot of the early television channels, most especially cable TV, as it was coming into its own. And it was just out there. And if you had the right equipment, with it tweaked a little bit here or there, you could receive these channels pretty much for nothing, minus the equipment cost. No monthly subscriptions. And then in the 1990s, the rules kind of changed up. They allowed the satellite broadcasters to actually encrypt their signal,

which meant that if you weren't paying for and had the correct keys, if you, you know, the encryption keys, you couldn't decode what was being transmitted. So that kind of made that into the hobby or the service go away. And it became more of a hobby because also in the 1990s, they released the RCA, DirecTV, Dish Network sorts of things. There's a lot of different brands back then, but these are the smaller dishes. They're about 30 to 36 inches around. And these are the ones you're probably more familiar with. The reason it changed so much was they allowed the signals to be encrypted, and you could focus more on one satellite. They put all their services on one versus a multiple range of satellites, like Papa's satellite dish that used to move around and growl with that big motor.

Nowadays, that wasn't necessary here in the 1990s because all the channels were on one downlink, and if you just had it pointed at static pointed in that direction, you could receive what you were paying for in your box in your house, decoded it. And the rural United States once again, enjoyed television, except now they were paying for it. And crazy enough, that's kind of died away because internet's getting everywhere. And now we're moved to streaming. So there's a little history about FTA, but let me tell you why I think FTA, at least at some level, may be worth a look. So my wife and I moved to the country with our children about 15 or so years ago.

We get down here, there's nothing. There's really still no internet. They're running fiber optic cable down the road now, but I'm not sure when that will happen and if I'll even subscribe. But we've been here a very long time and there's nothing. If you don't have an antenna with a mast and a rotator, you're not going to pick up any broadcast television. You can do the satellite internet, which we're not talking about, but that was popular for a while. We actually went into with AT&T, who is our service provider for our telephones, is the only one on the farm with a wireless broadband, which was just basically

a big hotspot and it worked okay. Now we're in Starlink. But when we got down here, there was no TV, no cable, no nothing. And of course, being a homeschool family and looking for programs that had uh eternal value and meaning and teaching to them we didn't want to just have you know like the local pbs station running 24 7 in our house because there's a lot of stuff on there and that most especially now even back then that was not great for your children so we decided to invest in a free-to-air satellite and what this allowed me to do was to put a 36 inch dish dish facing, I guess, it's kind of south-southwest, and establish that, had a $100 decoder box, and ran cable through the house to the TV. And we could get, at that point, about 140 channels.

The vast majority of them were in different languages, but still there were channels that had the Christian programming on them that we were interested in and being able to allow our children to watch. And that was kind of like what we did. It didn't cost anything beyond the equipment pricing, so there was no monthly subscription, anything like that. But there was a good 12 to 15 religious channels that coincided with our beliefs, and we utilized those as television entertainment and kids' TV. I don't know what you want to call it, but that's how we kind of went through a couple of years,

probably about five or six years, and our kids could watch the programming that we thought was good for them, and we could watch teaching and whatnot as well, and there's a lot of that out there. And we enjoyed that. But one of the things that I also enjoyed in addition to that type of programming was the fact that there was some what they call backhaul channels, backhaul, like you haul a trailer, H-A-U-L, backhaul channels. And these were connectivities or connections between news networks and a remote transmitter. So you've seen those satellite trucks at the NASCAR races or at the presidential rallies or whatever. And what we were able to do is we could get those signals for free as they were coming back down to the news network station to then, you know, use in production to show what they wanted to show or delete what they didn't want to show. One of the coolest things we

did with our FDA satellite, just in that regard, was during the Trump inauguration, we had the backhaul channels watching those. And I was able to show my kids like what was really happening, because that was the backhaul channel. This was the live, live feed that was coming in before it was, you know, talked over or commercialized or whatever from the news channels. So what I did was I turned on the backhaul channel and you could see the inauguration happening just like that, where no one was speaking over a speaker, any of that stuff. And then I would flip over to a national television station, a regular TV channel, and show them, see how it's been manipulated. See how they're not allowing that person to speak or they're talking over that person.

It was a great history lesson in propaganda for my kids. Let me just leave it there. I loved that about the FTA satellite. Well, a couple of things happened around the house. I've talked about Carla being sick and things going on different. And the FTA satellite kind of just went away, went the way of the dodo. And I was kind of bummed because I really enjoyed not only the backhaul channels and the religious broadcasting, I also really got a kick out of different nations having their English sometimes, and sometimes it wasn't English, but having their news broadcast over the satellites. I thought it was really cool.

So we would, mainly me, we could sit and watch television news from another country report on what was happening here and report on what was happening around the world from that country's perspective. Now, that might sound exactly like how I described shortwave radio. And really, that's exactly what I'm describing. It's an alternative view against the propagandized information that you may be getting no matter which country you're living in, no matter which side of the argument you're on. So FTA, in my opinion, was great for that about 10 years ago. Now, what happened is a lot of the channels now, 10 years later, have gotten away from that. And they're just using the internet point to point using fiber and all these things. So a lot of the channels,

even on the one channel we had on the satellite, we had was a hundred plus channels. I went on the other day, got it working. There was like seven channels, seven channels. And before we'd had hundreds of channels. I also have a rotator on my dish and can get multiple dishes. And I found it across the board. A lot of the channels that I used to watch the news channels from other countries and whatnot, they've gone away, but there's still some out there. And that's why I wanted to mention this to you, because I think a lot of people have never heard of FTA satellite. It's got a huge following. It's almost like a ham radio hobby, but it's FTA satellite. And there's

guys all over the country that have these dishes and I've got one dish. Okay. Uh, there's people who have eight, 10, 12, 15 dish set up in their yard with all these different receivers and whatnot. I mean, people, you can find people who are into everything and that's what you learn, especially with communications. There's a lot of people into FTA satellite still. And I learned the most about FTA satellite from a forum, which is still active, called Satellite Guys. I'll link that in the show notes. So if any of this sounds interesting at all to you, go to the Satellite Guys forum, get in there and ask some questions. There's so many smart people

in there. KE4EST Michael from up in Western North Carolina actually came to my home and helped me install my rotator on my satellite dish years ago. And Michael is just a brilliant guy when it comes to the satellite stuff. It's a hobby for him, much like shortwave listening, just like ham radio, just like CB radio, there is more to it. And for a prepper, in regards to communications, an FTA satellite can give you a look into another country's view. And it's really cool to be able to see their news. Like we watch ours, they're watching theirs. They have different presenters. They have different personalities.

A lot of them have different languages, but you can generally tell what's going on when you're watching the program. I just think it's a really great addition. Now, before I have told you that you have to buy an AM FM radio, you have to buy a shortwave, you have to get a scanner. I'm not going to go there with FTA satellite. 10 years ago, making this program 10 years ago, you have to buy FTA satellite. Today, the way it's changed, it's gotten less effective in regards to the information you can gather now, but it's still effective enough for me to mention it in the program and possibly whet your appetite for something a little different

that's pretty inexpensive to get into. Honestly, the decoder is about a hundred bucks. The dish is about a hundred bucks and you need some cable to run between them. That's really all it takes. If you want to add a motor to pick up multiple satellites, you may be at another $100. But for less than $300 or $400, you can get into this. You can watch television news from anywhere in the world. And I know, oh, I can do that on the internet. You sure can, as long as the internet is working. I just want to remind you, if you watch some of these movies that are filmed overseas, especially third world type backgrounds in films. You'll notice every house has a satellite on it. And the reason being is because a lot of nations have their own satellites that produce their own signals that carry their own nationalized news and television programming.

So if you're interested in that, if you like television, if you're into things of that nature, maybe you still have a VCR. I do, by the way. You may really, really dig FTA satellite, free-to-air satellite. Again, it doesn't cost you anything to watch these programs as long as you have the ability to receive the programs. And then, you know, there's some equipment required for that. I'll put some links in know, there's some equipment required for that. I'll put some links in the show notes with some trusted sellers of equipment. I've bought stuff from Amazon and eBay before for all of my stuff. There's a couple of dealers, maybe one or two dealers left that you can deal with that I would recommend. And I'll put all

that in the show notes. Again, this isn't like a bank breaking kind of you have to have this, but I didn't want to not mention it to you because there's a lot of information out there. There's news, there's backhaul feeds on satellites. And that's just, you know, that can be like a news reporter. It can be a weather thing. It can be conflict in another country. There's a lot of information you can gather. It's not as easy as turning a shortwave radio on, and there is some equipment expense and some labor to get that installed. But I mean, if you're kind of geeky, you may really dig it. It's called free-to-air satellite, and it is really still a very valid means of information collection.

And again, if you're preparing for an event, you want all the information you can get. So if your DSL, we have those anymore. If your charter pipeline goes down or your T-Mobile hotspot quits and you can't get information because of stuff like that. You know, you've got a free to air satellite, uh, unless they just put a big, uh, they shoot the satellites down or they just, you know, scramble it all. You can still get some information. And again, that's why I wanted to bring it to your attention in this program. It's not a 100% need anymore, but if you're interested in what's going on around the world from a different

perspective, from a deep propagandized view, at least from our Western outlook, FTA Satellite's a lot of fun. So check the show notes. Again, there's a lot out there, just like shortwave radio. It's not what it used to be, but there's still plenty out there that may make it worth your while. And I just wanted to share that with you. I didn't want to let this chance get by and then miss it down the road. So thank you again for listening. This is the PrepComs podcast. My wife and I and family, we have a water filter business, the British Birkfeld Berkey type water filters. We sell those here in South Carolina. We stock, we ship all over the country. We'd love to have your business if you need some water filters. If you're into what we're doing here, check out our store as well at prepcoms.com.

We've got merch and whatnot regarding this. We've got radios and things that we can help you with. If you need one-to-one consults, we do those too. Here's the thing. I'm not trying to create amateur radio operators everywhere, but I am trying to help preppers understand that it takes more than just buying things on Amazon to be prepared in regards to communications. That's the whole crux of this program to get you and your communications program together, get them working together, create a system for what happens down the road and for you to be able to communicate. All right. Thank you again for listening. God bless you. 73 y'all. We'll catch you next time. Outro Music you