FTA receiver
FTA receivers are sold in the United States and Canada for the purpose of viewing unencrypted free-to-air satellite channels, the bulk of which are located on Galaxy 19 (97°W, Ku band).
[2] There is also a substantial amount of Christian-based programming available on several satellites over both North America and Europe, such as The God Channel, JCTV, EWTN, and 3ABN.
Typically, PBS-X feeds carried programmes (except news) a day later than the main terrestrial PBS network.
centralcasting operation; many small UHF local stations were fed from one central point in Little Rock, Arkansas via free-to-air satellite.
Paradoxically, many Equity-owned local UHF stations obtained solid national satellite coverage despite small terrestrial LPTV footprints that barely covered their nominal home communities.
FTA receivers can be used in rural locations as a fairly reliable source of television without subscribing to cable or a major satellite provider.
In theory, a viewer in Glendive, Montana (the smallest North American TV market) could have received what little local CBS and NBC programming is available terrestrially, alongside a Ku band free-to-air dish for additional commercial networks (such as individual ABC and Fox TV affiliates from Equity Broadcasting, formerly at 123°W) and educational programming (PBS Satellite Service at 125°W).
Manufacturers, importers, and distributors of FTA receivers officially do not condone this practice and some will not sell to or support individuals who they believe will be using their products for this purpose, use of third-party software usually voiding any warranties.
This is accomplished by an Ethernet cable hooked to the receiver that allows updated decryption keys to be fed to the unit directly from the internet.
A key-sharing scheme operates by redistributing these keys in real-time to multiple receivers in an unlimited number of locations so that one valid smartcard may serve almost 10000 viewers.
This is the main control panel that allows the user to configure the receiver to interact with LNBs, switches, motors, and other equipment.
The user selects the LNB type, local oscillator frequency, appropriate DiSEqC switch port, and motor configuration.
Most FTA receivers give the user the option of configuring the language, aspect ratio, TV type (NTSC/PAL), and time settings.
Typically, most FTA receivers can accept an MPEG2 video stream in either PAL-compatible (540/704/720 x 576) or NTSC-compatible (640 x 480) image formats and convert it for display on either a PAL or NTSC monitor.
To fully exploit this capability, most Ku band FTA receivers will control a DiSEqC motor which can rotate a single dish to view one of any number of multiple satellites.
Individual adjacent or near-adjacent pairs (such as Glorystar on 97°W and 101°W) may be received, due to their close proximity, with two LNB's on what otherwise looks geometrically to be a standard parabolic dish.
Receivers with more memory (or storage on external devices such as hard drives) are often, but not always, better equipped to store and retrieve on-screen programme listings.
Some receivers, such as TripleDragon or Dream Multimedia's Linux-based Dreambox series, provide local area network interfaces.
Some broadcast networks use 4:2:2 encoding for otherwise-unencrypted transmission of sports events to local terrestrial stations, as it provides slightly better colour than the standard 4:2:0 compression.
These typically do not support ATSC's unique major.minor digital subchannel numbering scheme or the on-screen program guide but are capable of displaying (or timeshifting) local HDTV with no loss in detail.
However, an 8PSK module can be installed in place of the UHF remote and allows the receiver to decode the format used on most Dish Network high definition programming.
Many of the signals are backhaul or "wildfeed" video destined to individual stations, or are feeds to terrestrial transmitters programmed remotely.
These were not intentionally created as direct satellite broadcasts to home viewers, but often had been left unencrypted (in the clear) on the assumption that few people were watching.
The onus is on receiver vendors to voluntarily indicate, whenever they use lists of currently available FTA programming for marketing purposes, that free channels frequently may appear, move and disappear, often on a permanent basis, with no advance notice.
One North American example was Equity Broadcasting, once a major source of small local terrestrial stations on free satellite television.
[7] As many of the stations (such as New York state's WNGS and WNYI) were sold to Daystar and now originate nothing, the corresponding unique free-to-air signals (Galaxy 18, 123°W) are no more.
Many receivers will provide options for hardware expansion (such as to add 8PSK reception or DVB Common Interface TV subscription cards) and firmware upgrade (either officially or from nominally third-party sources).
Unlike digital terrestrial set-top boxes, most standard-definition DVB-S receivers do not down-convert HD programming and thus produce no usable video for these signals.
In some cases, malware has been released, ostensibly in the same format as existing third-party firmware, in an attempt to interfere with the further use of a widely cloned receiver's design.
