? Approx 1986 +/- a year. A co-worker found an ad for a complete
C-band system in one of those mail order catalogs that sold old discontinued and factory excess stuff. The system was a C-band 70 MHz LNA and had a separate dish mover that drove an optical sensor H-H. The thing weighed a ton. About the time I got it, HBO started to scramble, but there was another similar movie channel that stayed ITC for a couple years, but it finally started to scramble, and had a deal that if you subscribed (cheaper than HBO) that they would either give you or give you a good deal on a VCII unit, so I did that. However the VCII wasn't compatable with the LNA system I had, so I had to upgrade to a new receiver (Uniden), some time around 1989. About this time I bought a used 4' Ku dish/receiver from another co-worker. Never set this one up, but tried to strap the lnbf on the side of my C-band feed. This never worked very well, because the C-band dish wasn't shaped well enough to receive Ku. I did manage to receive NBC stuff, but it had no audio, since the GI ku receiver was for a special cable system and had an unusual audio freq, and it wasn't adjustable. Used that for about a year at which point the optical sensor on my dish went out. I manually moved the dish from sat to sat for several months using a home made power supply, but finally, in 1990, I bought a new dish (a SAMI), a new receiver, (Echostar 7000) and a Corotor C/Ku feedhorn, in order to upgrade to Ku. Used this until 1996, when I moved. I left that dish at the old house, and bought a Orbitron spinclination/Atlas H-H dish at my new house, and also got a Drake 1824 receiver. Still using both. When
PBS switched over to DCII, I was thinking about getting a 4DTV , but didn't want to give up the Drake, which is a really nice receiver, and at that time there weren't any 905 sidecars, so instead I bought a DSR4200 DCII receiver (which cost about $1200.. later got a second one for $40, which was sad.) This combination gave me access to all the free DCII stuff, and I already had VCII capability. Picked up a used 6' dish and a Monterey 50/55 receiver (about the only receiver better than the Drake) never really set them up, but just kept them as spares. But then, some time around 2002 or so, I decided to get into DVB, so I picked up a Fortec Lifetime and a
Twinhan 1020a. Later picked up a Broadlogic receiver, a Fortec Ultra, and later a Fortec
Mercury. Used these slaved off the Drake. Eventually got a motorized 90CM, and a fixed Primestar dish. Also, in the early years of this decade, NFL stopped having Sunday ticket on C-band, so I got a DirecTV system as well, and eventually switched over my subscriptions to
DTV. I kept a couple VCII subscriptions to CNN and a couple others for a while, but finally gave up the big dish subscriptions about a year ago, mainly because I often can't move the big dish in cold weather any more.
My main reasons for getting a TVRO system was (1) to receive PBS, and (2) to receive Pgh Steeler games, (3) for newsfeeds, wild feeds, backhaul sports feeds, and (4) NASA-TV, all of which were responsible for most of the upgrades I went through, ie Steeler games were on Ku, PBS first needed wide bandwidth audio which the Drake had, then they switched to DCII, which is why I got the 4200, and then NFL preseason games switched to FTA, etc. Also, I got into APT over satellite back in the early 90s. Ie back then AP news was sent to newspapers over a system called APT, which is similar to the system used by the NOAA weather satellites. There was also something called GOES TAP or something like that, which was also sent over regular TVRO satellites by APT on FM^2 subcarriers. So I bought an APT adapter that hooked up to the sat receiver, and it allowed me to display news clippings and GOES weather maps, and also NOAA weather maps directly on my computer screen, which was pretty neat. Also, got into SCPC reception, which is how many radio stations and other data and business transmissions used to be done back before mpeg digital became popular.
Not only got into TVRO satellite stuff, but also got into ham radio satellite stuff (mainly "easy" FM sats and MIR, space shuttle and space station). For a while I had a 2 axis motorized 2M/440 CP sat antenna that I used to manually follow LEO sats, but it was a low budget thing, and broke.
Anyway, I've been interested in a wide variety of satellite hobbies.