Who Chases with a Satellite Dish (TV)?

[Jonathan Williams]

I have seen a few pictures of people who chase with Satellite TV receivers on the back of their vehicles. I guess this is for picking up the local stations? Does anyone on the forum do this? How beneficial is it? It would be nice if you could pick up all the local stations you chase in, but typically its only the 3 where you live. I just thought it was kinda different/unique. Most people mount them where you would mount a trailer on the hitch.

Anyone do this?

 

[Tony Laubach]

I've discussed this with other chasers and we think its more for entertainment! Get a few movie channels to compliment the Weather Channel! Hell, during football season chasing, you can get Sunday Ticket and have all the games beamed into your vehicle! Beats listening to a lone AM station for some game you could care less about just to hear the scores from your game! )

 

[Dennis Sherrod]

I haven't had any use in a mobile environment with one, but the problem I would see would be aligning it properly everytime you stop. I know that they have to be aimed at a particular angle for each location you are. So, from my point of view I think it would be a pain. If I am wrong it this, someone please tell me.

 

[Tom Stefanac]

It's actually really easy to align a dish once you get the hang of it, I sometimes bring a system with me when camping, you get a feel for where the satellites are after a while but generally the eastern satellites in the 60 range are really high and they all sink to the SW until you hit the horizon (anywhere from 130 - 160).

As long as you know what north is you should be able to set your dish up in 3 - 5 minutes with some practice.

 

[Jay McCoy]

The guys I chase with used to have a satellite system back in the days before cell/modem or WxWorx and back when the Weather Ch. actually showed severe weather instead of spending 10 minutes on how quiet the tropics are while tornados rip through OK city (oh yes they did that). We would stop and spend 10 minutes trying to get a signal so we could get watch info and maybe catch a radar. Back then it was the only way to get "live" data. Now with cell or data cards and WxWorx I see no reason to use a dish for chasing. To watch some tv or something while waiting for the cap to bust..hmmm ..nah..i will just pop a DVD into the laptop.

 

[Jonathan Williams]

The guys I chase with used to have a satellite system back in the days before cell/modem or WxWorx and back when the Weather Ch. actually showed severe weather instead of spending 10 minutes on how quiet the tropics are while tornados rip through OK city (oh yes they did that).

Lol that is very true, but sad. They just leave it up to the local channels now. I wish they covered severe weather like they use to.

We would stop and spend 10 minutes trying to get a signal so we could get watch info and maybe catch a radar. Back then it was the only way to get "live" data.

Wow that took a long time.. I can't see it being utilized now, but I have seen people with them still today and that's why I was asking.

 

[Verne Carlson]

I used to pull my DirectTV dish and receiver off the house and drag it around with me from '95 to '99. We had to pull off the road set it up on a tripod, set the receiver to signal lock and scan around the southern skies until we got it locked. It worked well out in the middle of BFE to get a glimpse at TWC local on the 8's radar and see where the watch boxes where. The size of the dish and setup/teardown time was the big hassle. You'd be much better off going with wxworx and/or a cellular data card these days.

 

[David Drummond]

Back in 2000-2001 or so I used to use a DirecPc setup with an analog cell phone (that was when the uplink was by phone and the downlink by satellite). Also could get DirecTV. Had a nice 600 mhz Pentium 3 computer with a whopping 128 megs of ram back then and really thought that was great. LOL

When digital phones more abundant and DTV went to the more expensive two way setups, I took a little DTV dish/tripod for a while. Eventually canceled and stopped watching TV for the most part, and it was mostly for entertainment on the side of the road waiting for storms to pop than anything by that point. We were going to go with a Datastorm 2 way system, but to get any sort of decent upload bandwidth the prices are unreal.

 

[Dennis Sherrod]

Another thought on this. Won't the all HD signals make a difference in March of next year? The small TV I have carried for a few years will be useless without a HD converter. Then that ruins the idea of the small TV. The couple of small TVs I have seen so far that are HD ready are pretty expensive right now.

 

[JIM SELLARS]

After Feb 09 terrestrial TV will be all but useless unless you are within 20-30 miles of the transmitter maximum...DTV is an all or nothing deal....100% quality or 0% quality...the days of driving to a high spot and holding your "LEG" just right to get a snowy yet viewable TV signal will go the way of the "Passenger Pigeon"....

 

[Jeff Snyder]

Another thought on this. Won't the all HD signals make a difference in March of next year? The small TV I have carried for a few years will be useless without a HD converter. Then that ruins the idea of the small TV. The couple of small TVs I have seen so far that are HD ready are pretty expensive right now.

Just for clarification --> digital TV is not necessarily the same as HD TV; all HD content you'll see is digital, but not all digital content is HD. The changeover next year from analog to digital broadcast television does not require an HD TV -- the government (read: taxpayers and those buying govt debt) are providing coupons for digital-to-analog conversion boxes that, IIRC, make the end price approx $30 per box. Certainly $30 is cheaper than buying a new HD-ready TV for your vehicle (not to mention that any TV you'd bring w/ you in your vehicle is likely to be too small to notice much in the way of HD vs. non-HD broadcast content). On the good side, some metro-area TV stations transmit weather info on one of the subchannels, which may be of use when chasing near cities (e.g. OKC, DFW, ICT, etc). I haven't watched any of the local OKC-area TV channels in digital form to know what they carry on their subchannels. At any rate, I just wanted to make the clarification that DTV != HDTV... They used to sell 480p DTVs that made that point very clear, but I haven't seen those around too much lately. I have seen a few EDTVs ("Enhanced Definition TV" -- between HD and "standard") still around, however.

 

[Wesley Luginbyhl]

If you really want to have local tv broadcasts while chasing you can get a TV tuner card for your laptop in which most are digital or digital/analog. It was a real pain to get it to work correctly, but my friend eventually got it working with the tiny antenna provided. The signal came in pretty good. It might be possible to hook to a much bigger antenna, but I really dont know much about it. Having access to those stations might be better for entertainment than anything with how easy it is to get data anymore.

 

[David Drummond]

After Feb 09 terrestrial TV will be all but useless unless you are within 20-30 miles of the transmitter maximum...DTV is an all or nothing deal....100% quality or 0% quality...the days of driving to a high spot and holding your "LEG" just right to get a snowy yet viewable TV signal will go the way of the "Passenger Pigeon"....

That's interesting because my house is 40 miles from the transmitter for the station I chase for and I can pick up the digital signal just fine. Not so much so the analog signal.

 

[Gene Moore]

Japan recently launched an Internet satellite. If all goes well it will deliver very fast Internet speeds, in the GHz speed range, faster than our current cable offerings such as Roadrunner. The plan as it reads is to first serve customers in Asia, then move to the US. No time table on this though. To bad we can't do this in the US. The best we have is the old Hughes Net, which is expensive and horrible. It will be interesting to see the price points they establish, certainly if they intend it for the masses (China) it can't be too expensive, but it might aim more at high end customers such as large businesses.

From the CNN article: "If the technology proves successful, subscribers with small dishes will connect to the Internet at speeds many times faster than what is now available over residential cable or DSL services.The Associated Press said the satellite would offer speeds of up to 1.2 gigabytes per second. The service initially would focus on the Asia-Pacific region close to Japan."

 

[Joey Ketcham]

I have a USB TV tuner that I can plug into my laptop with a magnetic antenna to pick up local TV stations, I only used it once but it seemed to work well.