Did you watch the Super Bowl two weeks ago? I did. I had a fund-raiser and was told that I would have a better turnout if the viewers, many of whom were not really interested in the football game could watch the U.S. commercials. I have the Canadian Star Choice (now Shaw Direct) satellite system. And even when watching a rebroadcast of the Seattle station, naturally some of the U.S. commercials were replaced with local commercials. So just in case it was important for someone to see only the U.S. commercials, I reactivated my old big dish C-Band system so that those who wanted to see only the U.S. commercials could do so.
I am sure you all remember what C-band is. It’s the first satellite system we had available in North America, where depending how far south you were, you might need anywhere from a 10 to 18 foot in diameter satellite dish to pick up the programming. I am sure you have seen many of them sitting abandoned on the roofs of many houses.
Looking at a copy of my 1998 Satellite Orbit magazine, I was reminded that in order to view all of the 200+ channels available, that I needed to move my big dish to 21 different locations/satellites where each satellite had as few as one or two programs to as many as 24. Today, using the more efficient digital technology, there are still some 170 channels but on only 11 satellites, with six of those satellites carrying 80 percent of all of the programming.
The one great advantage of C-Band is that when it is raining hard you do not lose your signal as you do with Ku-band systems such as Star Choice and DISH. Sadly the disadvantages are much greater. Imagine if your spouse wanted to watch programming that was on one satellite and you the programming on another. You couldn’t do it because your big dish can only be pointed at one satellite at a time. Star Choice, for example, has a permanently mounted small dish pointing at two satellites at once with more than 470 channels to choose from. And with separate receivers, each of you could watch whatever you wanted. And which size dish would you rather have on your roof, a 16 footer or the 36.5 by 26.5 inch Ku Star Choice dish? It gets worse. While C-band only offers 3 HD channels, Star Choice offers 57 and DISH even more.
Because of the disadvantages of the big dish system, fewer persons are subscribing to C-band each year; in fact the salesperson who activated my receiver told me that there were only 18,000 of us left and that the maximum period I could sign up for was six months because Motorola was contemplating ceasing all C-band programming at the end of this year.
I’ll be sad if C-band programming ends, but with such great alternatives as Dish and Star Choice, I understand why.
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