Technical Update

I trust all the fathers out there had a good Father's Day. It was an interesting Father's Day from a technical standpoint. I got a satellite dish.

Not one of those trite DSS dishes. I mean a real satellite dish.

What a lot of people don't realize, thanks to the digital satellite and cable providers, is that there is still free unscrambled programming up on "the birds" as TV engineers like to call them. If you get onto eBay and check for "Free To Air DVB", you'll see listings for the equipment pop up, and it's reasonably cheap, too.

There are two main kinds of satellite frequencies, C-Band and Ku-Band. There are some differences in the two, but if you're not a TV guy, these will be of no interest to you. The bottom line is this: Ku-Band Free to Air equipment is cheaper, but the only Catholic TV station you can get on that is TV-TRWAM, which will do you no good unless you speak Polish. C-Band is where the Free to Air signals for both EWTN and Familyland TV both reside, and you can use the same receiver as you can with the KU-Band signal. The caveat is this: You need a big dish.

So I got one. A nine foot Winegard dish from someone from my Freecycle list...

Don't worry - the neighbors have been warned. Never know - perhaps Mater Dei Television can earn a little money on the side in the downlinking business...

In other news, as the office is coming along fantastically now, I started working more on the playlist computer, and I've been playing with a few linux distros to see what they can do. I've decided for the time being I'm going with Fedora Core. That way, I can get used to it and use it as a basis for my very own distro...

More later...

ICTM,
Chuck, MI