 Today we're going to talk about satellite TV technology. This is going to range everything from, let's see, we're going to... louder? Okay. Is this better? Okay. We're going to talk about everything from huge dishes down to small dishes, from satellite internet service to, you know, encryption, decryption, nag revision, dish network, direct TV, just going to try and go through a lot of it very, very quickly. At the end we'll have a little bit of a question and answer and afterwards if you want to ask me some questions, just meet me out by the pool I guess. So, okay, we'll start. This section is where I'm going to sort of describe how a channel from CNN, ESPN, gets from their broadcast location to your home via a home service such as a dish network or direct TV and sort of by explaining this diagram, this model it'll help you understand how the home services work. Okay. So first what CNN does is they have their new station in Atlanta and they send their signal to a satellite Telstar 6 on transponder 22 at 93 degrees west. The location of the satellite is given in degrees away from the Greenwich Meridian and this is because all the satellites are located along the equator so there's no point in having north-south coordinates. The symbol rate is four mega-symbols per second, the forward air correction is set to three-fourths. All this stuff I'm going to go over but I just want to familiarize the terminology. 93 degrees west and this is just what I went over. The Greenwich Meridian so all of the major communication satellites are located on the equator and what happens is they're on geosynchronous orbits so they're basically stationary in the sky and this allows a home user or anybody using one of these services to point it once and never have to deal with it again. And a common misconception is the big dishes are for tracking the satellites as they move while there are some that can do that, the vast majority of them are only for geosynchronous satellites. And here's a video to sort of demonstrate how a dish would move across the arc of satellites and see as it slowly moves, it moves in an arc from one horizon to the other. This particular one will in the span of it moving across the sky will cover about 40 different satellites in this, you know, 50 second clip. The major satellites, there's about 10 home satellites that use that are used between direct TV, dish network. They use a circular polarity which is different than the other satellites and we'll get to that in just a second. Okay, a transponder is actually a combination receiver and frequency converter and then a transmitter package and what happens is a satellite will uplink at a certain frequency that's different than the downlink frequency and this is done to prevent interference on the uplink and the downlink. So when they uplink the signal it's sent as a direct stream up to this satellite at a very, very specific location and then it's sort of beamed back out along a footprint so direct TV, dish network, they all have a footprint that covers the continental United States. The footprint for other satellites may be as big as a city. They can do this by using spot beams and different technology and this is to illustrate the point of the polarity. The polarity is kind of odd. The vertical polarity and the horizontal polarity is the most common used type of polarity method among like broadcast technology because it's very, very easy to implement and it's cheap to make but the DBS services, they use a circular polarity and this is done to prevent interference at the same time it's kind of weird. It's completely non-standard. They're the only basic services that use it and so it's really sort of difficult to deal with but they do it because terrestrial interference happens all the time because the surface waves from the earth when the earth moves, they have a vertical polarity and so they mess up a lot of the satellite communications and whatnot. Not on a regular basis but when they do happen it's bad and another problem they have a circular polarity is the rain fade. The vertical and the horizontal polarity is not as prone to the rain fade which is why they use it for the TV distribution like of channels and stuff because it's just way easier to deal with during rain, sleet, snow. Okay. Symbol rate, this is going to be a little tricky to explain but it's basically the bit rate of the transmission. This is oversimplifying it a bit but basically if any of you know the difference between a bot rate and a bit rate the symbol rate would be the bot rate. You can send so many symbols per second but it corresponds with how you modulate that symbol rate to turn it into a bit rate. So if we're talking about something like Direct TV or Dish Network and they use QPSK modulation for sending out their video then they can put two bits for every symbol which therefore increases their bit rate from whatever they use times two. So if they use four mega symbols per second now it's eight. And the forward error correction. Forward error correction operates on an assumption that errors will happen and errors do happen all the time and it's really, really inefficient. So normal network transmissions you can request for more information to be sent whenever there's a problem. The broadcast mediums have a problem in that the receiver cannot request information so they send out an error correction with every single bit of information. So if there's three bits of streamed data there's going to be one bit of error correction. That's what the three fourths correspond to. If it was five six then it would be five bits of streamed data and one for error correction. So now we're at Dish Network and Direct TV and what they do is they take the stream, they decrypt it, they decode it and they put it back into another stream which is then multiplexed and sent up after it's encrypted. The only difference between these two, between your sort of home services and the services that they get as encryption and the number of channels per transponder, this particular CNN feed which goes to Dish Network or Direct TV operates on one transponder. And then you have the home services which operate on, they have many channels for transponder so the bit rate is going to be lower because they have to smash in more stuff in less space. And after they encrypt it then it's sent up to the satellite. Okay. And then they have a Niagara vision which is very, very common in Europe. EcoStar uses it. EcoStar owns Dish Network and Bell Express View. It's somewhat secure although many people have hacked around it. The actual encryption method is quite secure but it's the smart card and how they authorize the stuff that's actually quite insecure. The transponder 16, that's actually just not even relevant. I'm just doing this to sort of familiarize with the terminology again. The frequency is 12.443 GHz and all of your receivers know this information. They don't have to search out and find it or you don't have to specify it. And this operates within the DBS band. DBS band is just those home services that operate within a specific frequency range which is 12.2 to 12.8 GHz and the symbol rate is 20,000. 20,000 Kilo symbols per second. Now you're thinking, whoa, wow, that's great. It's way higher than what we just had but if you keep in mind we're putting 6 or 7 video streams, 6 or 7 audio streams, satellite internet service, some system information streams. I mean it adds up quick. So you end up with 15 streams within that one symbol rate and so you end up with a much lower bit rate. And keep in mind this is the symbol rate before the error correction. So if we have 20,000 Kilo symbols per second then it's going to be 40,000 megabits per second and then you chop off a fourth of that through down to 30. So effectively you only have 30 megabits per second to work with. The forward error correction is 5.6. Service ID basically corresponds to the channel number. The video packet identifier and the audio packet identifier. This is a very, very hard topic but I'm going to sort of breeze through it. Basically your information streams have a whole bunch of information as to where everything is. Sort of like CNN's video is here and CNN's audio is here and it knows to put those two together and put them into a stream. It receives all this information in various series of other acronyms but we won't get into that through program access tables and stuff like that. I am going to make one specification here that the information from this slide forward is going to be DVB specific which Dish Network and Bell Express View use but Direct TV uses their own called DSS which has a different length of packet and these weird technology that is not compatible with anything. So what happens here is you have your home system. You have the receivers that contain conditional access modules where your smart card goes. The smart card holds the keys for decrypting streams so when a stream comes in it goes to the conditional access module. The conditional access module goes do you have a key for this stream? The stream goes yes I do and here you go and decrypts it. Now whether or not something goes through the conditional access module depends on whether or not it has a certain header within the packet itself. There is something called the transport scrambling flag which is a little two-bit piece of information at the beginning of each packet and it specifies whether or not it should go to the cam and then ask for a key or just go to the cam and then go on to the decoder and the DMUX the multiplexer which separates the audio from the video. The funny thing is that you can get PCI cards that can operate with the same functionality with a hardware cam module. You plug it into the PCI card and then you plug in your smart card and you program it to get your channels. This is done mostly in Europe. It's barely catchy on America. There is software to emulate the conditional access modules. Several different types of cards exist. The main ones are the hardware and the software. That's sort of the main difference between the two. Hardware PCI cards they have a hardware MPEG decoder in them so they can decode the stream just as it comes in and they don't have to use any system resources to decode them. The software ones on the other hand rely on the system's power and capabilities to decode the stream. One of the cooler tools that you can use with this program shown here is the picture of. It's called PROG DVB and it's basically just a software receiver. It operates with PCI DVB cards. One of the plugins that I threw in the CD-ROM packet there was a plugin where if you specify the packet IDs of a satellite internet service provider you can download everything that anybody is receiving through their satellite internet service. It dumps everything onto your hard drive and you can set it up to filter for file names or by file size. The only problem is that a lot of the people that use satellite internet service, they live in rural locations so it's lots of porn. I don't know if it's a problem but it's a problem if you want to get any information off of them. The destination IP and the MAC address are also stored with each file. There's a DEX file that saves it too so you can see whether or not who it was going to. I don't know why they wouldn't encrypt it but it's just silly because people are stupid. Free to air stuff. We'll go over that now. Free to air channels are basically done to provide people want weird channels basically and they want them for free. What they do is they send them to satellites like there's some pretty funny ones on here such as this one which is a very brief listing of free to air channels on Telstar 5. We have the Rangarang TV. We have the Jam-E Jam and we have the Jesus Satellite TV which is fun watching. As you can see here the coordinates for it. I'll explain what all these mean. 97 degrees west is how far over it is so you know where to point your satellite dish. The KU band is what it operates in which is 11.7 to 12.2 gigahertz. This means that you can use one of your smaller dishes not like your home dishes but you can get away with maybe a 35 inch dish instead of you know a 10 foot dish. Vertical Pallarity. Pallarity is specified there. Then the name of the channel there. At the end there this is actually the symbol rate of that particular transponder. It's not the symbol rate of each channel but some of the other stuff that people often want to know about is C-band because they often hear lots of rumors like you can get pre-air TV shows before they air in the US and it's true you can. Pre-air Primetime Network TV shows are sent to Canada without logos and without commercials because they have contracts to air them in Canada and so they overlay their own commercials and their own logo so they send them to Canada first and what you can do is tune into these because they're unencrypted, they're part of the airwaves, no one cares because basically they're kind of lazy and the system works now so they don't want to change it. So if you're willing to set up a 7.5 dish or a 10 foot dish you can watch alias or whatever show you like before it airs. If you see here, here's a little guide that I've partially pasted from the URL that I have at the end. 24 which is a popular show. 7.30 am my time because I'm from the mountain standard time or 3.30 am on the east coast on Tuesday morning now it airs Tuesday night so you can get it 15 hours in advance and all of these go through, I mean all of them have ranges that go from 2 hours to 72 hours in advance and it's kind of phenomenal that even such a thing exists because in today's TV technology they're just, they're fanatical about keeping their copyrights and whatnot but then they send this stuff unencrypted before anyone else has access to it. This is often how spoilers for episodes get released. Now tips for getting equipment. KU band equipment which we just talked about the free to air stuff. 60 centimeters, 120 centimeter dish, 18 inch to 45 that's basically the size you'll need. The LMBF and feed horn with the horizontal and vertical polarity which they use is going to require, I don't know, it'll cost you maybe 40 bucks, 30 bucks. Receiver, set top box or DVBS card can cost you about 100 bucks, maybe 200. Total cost about 250 new for basic setup and you can legally set these up even if you live in a homeowner's association area because the laws basically say you can own up to one meter dish legally. Even if their laws say you can't you can because the FCC regulates that. The CVAN equipment on the other hand if you live in a homeowner's association area you probably can't. 7.5 dish to 12 foot dish is normal preferably mesh because wind resistance is a big problem. The wind resistance against the dish often will snap them. Hurricanes in Florida and the southeast will just tear through dishes very very easily. The LMB which converts the downlink frequency these are all just the different parts. The skew motor controls the feed horn's polarity and the actuator moves the dish. So the actuator was that device moving the dish as it went across. The skew motor knows when to switch back and forth so if you have your receiver set up to at this certain location I want it to go to a vertical polarity because that's what the satellite is then when you move the dish and it sends a signal to switch it to that polarity. The analog receiver set top box that's what most of these pre-air feeds are if you're interested in that sort of stuff. A few of them are digital and then even fewer of them are digitally encrypted. None of the analog ones are encrypted which is what most of them are. Total cost is about $1,000 to, it says $2,500 but I mean some of the stuff I've seen maybe $5,000 for a basic set up or you can go on eBay which I did, I got my entire set up for $100 bucks including everything including a receiver that's $900 new because people don't know what they can do. They basically just throw them away. It's like we're going to take it to the dump but we'll sell it on eBay. So you can get them for really really cheap all the time. Same with the KU band stuff although not as cheap because people still use them because they're not quite as obnoxiously big. Here's some other links that we're going to go over. The North American feed air channels, good guide, digital MPEG information, Mr. Video's wild feed list which that was a partial showing of. It has just tons, I'm talking about like 300 shows there that feed, I mean it's not just new shows, it's also dedicated ones so you'll get 10 airings of Jerry Springer in a row in one night which is just really annoying. DVB forums is a good place if you're interested in that file grabber I'd definitely check out those forums. They have a section for it or progdvb.com which is the guy who wrote it. Dr. Dish's satellite espionage, very very interesting link because he basically goes through different stuff that he's done with satellite dishes and how he's picked up spy satellites and all sorts of really really really cool stuff. Some of the stories that include how one would file a fake tax return in another person's place via satellite from Europe and get their check. This is really kind of questionable. Basic broadcast information there at the bottom and of course it greets to the SLC2600 crew and Geek Syndicate and I want to know if anybody has any questions about the question was sort of to go over spot beams because Direct TV's been rolling them out and Dish Network's been rolling them out too and how they work. Basically what happens is the signal sent up to the satellite and the spot beam focuses its power in one particular area so they have a certain type of radio that they can point in a certain area. The one that they have for their nationwide coverage is much more powerful and has much more broad sort of broadcast area I don't know exactly how to say that but the spot beams sort of they're just the same just focused in a certain area they don't operate any differently. Is there anything else? Okay the question was to want to know how far it's been sort of widespread used. Okay the question was how widespread is the spot beam use and who else uses it and what applications sort of apply to that. Is that right? So spot beams are used just for the regional coverage stuff. There isn't a whole lot of nationwide stuff that they would only use in spot beams so it's mostly just local channels and stuff. Some spy satellites use spot beams because they're good at keeping other people away from the information. Some weather satellites use them. Other home services like Direct TV they use them Dish Network uses a few of them on some satellites but there aren't I wouldn't say that a ton of them use it but anything you want unless it's local channels you can get on the other satellites. You have a question there? I'm thinking you want to know how tight the spot beams go. How close of an area. The spot beams can operate within about the one on the east coast that you're sort of wondering about. It operates from basically DC in New York. There's a spot beam for I'm thinking of Dish Network right now. I don't know about Direct TV like their particular spot beam but the Dish Network one operates within that entire area. So is there something more? Okay. Any other question there? Yeah. Okay. His question is about the HD streams and yes there is information about them and the PCI cards that we just went over the hardware mode on the hardware cards or the software cards themselves they can decode them. The HD streams themselves you can find information about them on that forum forums.dvnetwork.com. The Direct TV ones of course they use non-standard stuff so it's much harder to use them unless you buy their equipment. The Dish Network stuff is a little bit more compatible with other technology. So the HDTV stuff there is information about it and most of the stuff is located on satellites on the coast so they're not located on the main ones in the middle of the sky at 110 and 119. In laundry mats? In a laundry mat right? Is that what you said? Alright. So his question was how does a smart card different from the P3 to the P4 on Direct TV which they use and the smart card they use in a laundry mat. The difference between the Direct TV cards and the one used at the laundry mat hypothetically they're basically just different types. They have different ways of storing information in the layers so the Dish Network uses one that has about 50 layers within that tiny little chip and it has that information allocated to be certain areas within each one of those layers and so they made their own conditional access modules to access just that type. And the one used at the laundry mat is probably very, very generic, you know, compatible with a lot more variety of applications. The difference between the P3 and the P4. The P4, I'm going to tell you right now, I don't know tons about it but I don't think anybody does. Some people do but I don't. The P4 basically has built-in routines that if you try and mess around with it or if it thinks that you're trying to mess around with it it'll kill itself. So is that the same as what a GS... He wants to know if that's the same idea as what the SIM cards used in the GSM phones. I don't know, I don't own any GSM phones. So he basically just sort of clarified something there that this fellow had a question about. The ones at the laundry mat, I mean assuming they're very generic type, will just store information on the ones that Direct TV uses, have routines built-in to deter people from messing around with them. That's sort of the major difference. Well, I mean it is and it... Right, right. And some of them don't have routines built-in to destroy themselves. They just have... But there are several that just operate as storage. Right. He basically just said that the laundry mat just has a little database of how much money you have left. And yes, they all do have CPU and RAM. Yeah, smart cards. The legal implications of messing around with that stuff, you go to jail, fool. Yeah, so basically if you mess around and decrypt someone's signal and they didn't tell you to decrypt it, you have just violated the DCMA. So, Cameless IRDs. Yeah, they're cool. Cameless IRDs basically are receivers that don't have a sort of tagged conditional access module with a certain ID so that you can mess around and change them as Dave's blacklist gets updated. Whatever. I don't know anything about that. Sorry. You want to know if I played much with Starban? The previous guy's question was whether or not I'd SEP? SEPC? Single Carrier Per Channel? Data Services? I don't know a whole lot about them other than the SEPC would be a single carrier per channel. It means that it operates just as one stream on a satellite. And what was your question again? It's Starban. You want to know if I've ever messed around with Starban or any information about it? Starban, I'm assuming you mean the Internet Service? Yeah, the Internet Service Starban. There's lots of information out there about it. I assume you can use the file grabber program in conjunction with Starban. Can you say that again, please? What's the difference? I don't know anything about Starban because I live in a metropolitan area and I don't need satellite Internet Service. I don't know. The Starban stuff is, he was basically just asking what the difference was between different model numbers. Anyone else have any questions? The Direct TV stuff? Direct TV stuff, again, not my 4-tape, so I don't know. I could bullshit something, but I honestly don't know. Two-way satellite stuff? Basically the Direct Way and stuff like that. They just have a very, very small, well, low power transmitter and then also just the normal feed horn. And they operate sort of in the same way that a home satellite's TV setup works, but just with also a transmitter package on there. And they're sort of allocated a certain bit of information on a certain stream, so they're allocated just a tiny bit. Is there any sort of limit as the number of dishes that can point to a satellite? No. Because it operates as a broadcast. It's basically like throwing confetti. Anybody can grab it and it's like just unlimited. Well, it's governed by network policy. He was asking if there's any limit to the power and the bit rate that you can operate at. The bit rate, you can't sort of hack and get more upstream. I mean, you can have a stronger signal, but could you overload your neighbors? You could overpower their signal, but you wouldn't end up getting more bandwidth per se. Probably the Hop-Hog Nexus S. They run you about 220 bucks. And they have the hardware M-Pig decoder. And they're compatible with just about every piece of software out there. How aggressive are Dish Network's anti-piracy? Are they going to come after you? Is that what you wanted to know? From what I've sort of seen, Direct TV will kill you and then Dish Network sort of won't. It seems like there's two different sort of policies. Direct TV is to hit everybody over the head that's stealing service and Dish Networks is to just get more subscribers. It seems like Dish Network probably doesn't care as much. I mean, if I had to say so. Preemptive just to scare people. I mean, he wanted to know why Dish Network or Direct TV cares so much about the P4 and their new cards. And I said basically just to scare people. Go in the blue shirt. The fact that they think that they're... I'm literally just saying that the Direct TV has basically a less fail safe and sort of secure. They have a more secure Dish Network is more secure. They feel that they're more secure about their encryption system, which is... I don't agree, but I mean the reps aren't that smart then because the DSS or the video guard which they use is just... it's really... it's a pretty secure encryption system. It's just how they do the authorization at Direct TV that's all messed up. And Dish Network, they use a very... just sort of mainstream Niagara vision. I mean, people in Europe have been messing around with Niagara vision for years. So the... I don't agree that the Direct TV is necessarily less secure than Dish Network. So you want to know why they don't send out the instructions to wipe the cards more often. So why don't they send out the sort of lists to make sure that you can't get service? Why don't they do that more often, the ECMs? Why don't they send them out more often? Probably because it takes a while to update the information. It probably takes a while to get more data on which ones need to be updated before they can send out the streams. Direct TV seems to send them out quite often. Yeah, I mean, they're... they're insane. Oh, none. Because it's all sort of in the system information table. You're losing very, very little. So you want to know about sort of larger skill events like sporting events and maybe conferences that are sent via satellite if they're encrypted or, you know, experienced with them. A lot of the video conferences and news feeds and stuff are not encrypted. They just don't deal with it. Sporting events are, typically, with the exception of maybe a few Formula One races or something. But on a whole, like, Sunday NFL games, they're always encrypted. So you want to know if the stations sort of control what's encrypted and not encrypted. So if everything... is everything Fox sends encrypted or is everything... The actual encryption and decryption is controlled by the production studio and not the station. So if it's Warner Brothers studio that's putting out, they'll go through a digital provider called CBC and they will use a digital uplink and they sort of pick and choose which ones Warner Brothers will... that they want encrypted. You know, friends usually is and West Wing will be. But all the other ones, typically, aren't. The other sort of different ones, Fox, ABC, they don't encrypt them. Only stuff that comes through Warner Brothers is encrypted. So you want to know if Direct TV and Dish Network both use the keys on the conditional access module for the decryption. Yeah. No. What it does is it acts as a receiver where you can tune the information on the PCI card. You want to know if there was any... if you can just automatically decrypt Dish Network using one of these PCI cards. No. You can't. It enables... the new thing that came out with Dish Network enables you to not cross reference the key. Yeah. Not... okay. So to put it on another card or device, is that what you're saying? The Camless stuff, it doesn't have anything to really... the Camless, is that what you mean? The Camless stuff doesn't really apply to the PCI cards because you can automatically program the Cam ID within the software. You can say take this Cam ID but you'd have to get your receiver out and hook it up and to get the Cam ID off of it or get it off the card. So hook it up. So he wants to know about sending the movie theaters via satellite. I don't... I think it's kind of a rumor because I've never seen anything about it and they might have done it back in the day but I don't think they do... I haven't heard anything about them do it. About Lucasfilms. If they do it'll be encrypted using PowerView probably because it's pretty secure. So it is coming. There are... Lucasfilms is going to deliver via satellite. All of them? Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So he's basically said that the Lucasfilms is going to send their information out to the movie theaters, movie theaters and the digital box that they can control what place where with the digital projection system. I haven't heard anything about it but interesting nonetheless. Anybody else?