Free to Air Satellite

This is Tony Zamboni here and i want to chat a bit about the Free to Air industry. I have been installing satellite systems full time for over 5 years and have done literally a thousand installations , probably more I lost count a long time ago. I have installed for DishNetwork as well as DTV, so i have a well rounded experience.

Free to Air came to my attention when a customer was asking about getting the free wild satellite feeds. This consisted of mostly PBS as well as lots of foreign channels. So I investigated it and found out lots of eye opening information.

I found that there is a hobby out there that many people don't know about, it's called free to air. What this consists of is a free to air satellite receiver and a free to air satellite dish. The dish used for free to air is a round dish usually about 30 inches wide with a linear LNB . The receivers are from $100 to $400 depending on what you want.The High Definition ones are the most expensive.

The dishes range from $70 to $150 depending on how many satellites you are trying to get. The programing is varied but it consists of mostly public broadcasting as well as international channels. They carry a lot of international channels and local channels. So if you live on the east coast and want some local channels on the west coast you can find some to get.

There are many websites that have the satellites listed with the corresponding channels that they get. But that is not the scope of this lens. If you do a search for free to air satellites you will find information about it.what I want to talk about is the existence of an "Underground Society".

You may ask , what is that all about, you basically have Dishnetwork, DTV and the free Free to Air feeds. The first two you pay a monthly subscription to the second one you do not. Everyone knows about the first two , but not many do about the Free to Air.
What is this "Undrgroung Society ".

It is a whole population of people that are using Free to Air receivers to get DishNetwork programing for free. When I found out about this I became intrigued and wanted to know more. so I searched , went to countless forums and investigated what this was all about.
Nobody wanted to talk about it, they banned you from a forum for mentioning it. Everything was discussed in "code" as not to actually say it out right. They used terms like Dave , Bev and many others as nicknames for satellite providers.

They discussed everything in a round about way , so this got me more intrigued ! so I dug more and would get pieces here and there about it. after many months and searches I met a guy who know the truth ! I befriended him and eventually was told most of what was going on. With what he said and with what I dug up on the internet, I had most of the picture together.

I found out that besides the "Underground Society" of people actually doing it there was the other side that was actually doing the hacking. There is a group of individuals that are computer programmers that write the "code" for the receivers. This code is posted on the internet on these forums and the johnny at home downloads them from the internet and uploads it into his free to air receivers.

Then this "upgrade" makes the receiver get the DishNetwork programming ! I was amazed at the number of people involved in this activity ! There were literally tens of thousands of people doing it ! So I found out what it was all about, the history of it, who was involved and how this all came to be. It was a very interesting story that goes from the corporate room of multimedia companies to the coders to the guy at home watching it.

There was lots of conspiracy theories flying around as to who was responsible , who to point the finger at. To theories of DishNetwork and DTV trying to undermine each other in the marketplace. so I took what i found and wrote an E-book about it, it is very enlightening material to say the least.

So if you are interested in the book then go to this website:

Free2Air.info

I set a blob up also that will inform you of the current state of affairs of F2A

Free2Air.info/blog