Hehheh, okay you would almost have had the poll close to reality if it wasn't for option B. Maybe that was just too tempting to click or you really are suspicious of those with large dishes in their yard. And this coming from people that sneak around at night with telescopes and cameras.
Option A is quite rare. I know very few people into radio astronomy, just a couple.
Option B, well the TV pirates are less common than you would think and very little piracy is happening with the large dishes. The large dishes are designed for C band and work very inefficiently on Ku band where Foxtel/Austar live. About the only pirates left these days would be using card sharing and only need a little 2 foot dish. The big dish users are doing something else.
Option C, unless the dish is parked very close to and directly between the TV station and you TV antenna it won't do a think to the normal TV reception. The nearest tree would likely do more to degrade the signal.
Option D is what I do and yes there are forums like this one devoted to what you can get up there. I'll give a little tour in a minute.
Option E the last option in no doubt the winner. There are many ethnic people in Australia or those that speak another language. There are TV broadcasts free to air on C band where almost every other language can be found. Chinese is probably the most common, but you will find Italian, German, French, Arabic, Turkish, Dutch, Russian, Korean, Greek, Japanese, Indonesian, the list goes on.
Why the big dishes? It's all to do with frequency. For a dish to have enough usuable gain on C band (3.4-4.2 GHz) it has to be large. The big advantage of C band over Ku is coverage area. A satellite transmission beam is very wide on C band and will cover Australia as well as Asia where Ku is a much tighter spot and will only cover Australia, if it was pointed there.
It's a hobby for me and many others like astronomy. Plus there are some good legal and free English channels up there.
ABC Asia Pacific has 100% Australian content. It's designed for the Asia region but is still good watching.
BBC World is on Foxtel but you can get it fo free on C band. News on the hour and has some good programs in between.
CCTV9 is from Central China television and is 100% English. The best coverage of the first Chinese Tychonaut came from this channel where the local news had only a very brief report. I got to see the Tychonaut stagger out of his craft live!
Now TV is the channel of choice for gamers!
So with news, sports, music and sometimes the odd movie channel it's quite fun, and it's FREE!
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