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TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 04-05/2012
— www.TELE-satellite.com
If in the USA you want to find out
more about satellite reception, you go
straight to the Internet to the Satellite-
Guys.us forum. Numerous threads in
this forum provide any and all informa-
tion not only on the reception of freely
receivable satellite signals, but it also
provides help for any problems that
subscribers to the two satellite PayTV
operators in the USA might have. A
team of 25 volunteers manage all of the
sub forums and also take care of their
own specialized subjects. The forum
has 175,000 registered users; the oc-
casional users and visitors to the forum
make up a multiple of that number.
Founder and organizer of Satellite-
Guys is Scott Greczkowski. He lives in
Newington, a suburb of Hartford, the
capital city of the state of Connecticut
in the USA on the American east coast.
That’s where we paid him a visit since
we wanted to get a better understand-
ing of how Scott created the largest
satellite forum in the USA. How did he
even get started with satellite recep-
tion?
“I was an enthusiastic radio listen-
er early on in life”, remembers Scott,
“When I was young I was always try-
ing to receive radio stations that were
further and further away with my AM
radio.” Scott had his first encounter
with satellite reception when he was 13
years old. “In a store that my parents
shopped in quite often there was one
day a satellite reception system on dis-
play.” Little Scott was completely fas-
cinated with it and turned the antenna
from left to right. He couldn’t believe
that so many TV channels could be re-
ceived from so far away.
He had to wait a few years, but by
1991 he was able to acquire his own
satellite system. “At 19 years old I
moved into my own apartment and
managed to convince the landlord to let
me erect a 2.5-meter antenna on top of
the garage.” He paid US$3000 for that
system and still remembers his first re-
ceiver. “It was a General Instruments
model 650, one of the best analog re-
ceivers of the time.”
A friend of his then started an Inter-
net company. Scott helped him out with
that and in 1995 a radio show started in
the TechTalkNetwork. It dealt with sat-
ellite reception („Friday Night Live with
Gary Bourgois“ - Gary passed away in
2010) and it was from here that Scott
got the idea to record this radio show
and encode it as a stream so that he
could offer it through his friend’s In-
ternet server. “It took three hours to
encode one hour of the radio program
for the Internet stream.” At the same
time the company Real Networks de-
veloped software that would allow this
audio encoding at a much faster rate so
that even live transmissions were pos-
sible. To test this software, Real Net-
works contacted a number of Internet
service providers including the compa-
ny from Scott’s friend. They found the
right guy. Scott immediately put the
software into service and carried the
radio program live in the Internet. “We
had a license for 100 listeners and with
our first broadcast we had 80 listeners
logged in.”
This gave Scott the first sense that
the Internet was an interesting medium
that he could use to expand his satel-
lite hobby. But the actual breakthrough
where Scott would actively use the In-
ternet came a little later. “In 1997 the
cable company ‘Digital Cable’ began
their first tests with digital technology
and believe it or not selected my area
as their test location.” Scott was the
first private customer that got a digi-
tal cable connection. “I sat right down
and wrote a report on the operation of
the digital TV box that included many
The prime focus antenna is
fitted with a C/Ku-band LNB