Technology is mainly what changed that. The transmitters have a hell of alo t more power, and I bet by just using the diameter of the receiver dish it can be mathematically calculated.
As far as I can tell, the old big six foot satellite dishes picked up signa ls from Sputniks (my pet name for them) that were doing alot more things. L ike handling overseas phone calls and all kinds of shit. But now, they have better solar cells and dedicated satellites that do noting but television.
I was there when only the few had a dish, and it was huge. And it only used SSAVI scrambling which I found quite easy to beat. Then for security the d igitally encoded the audio but then some people didn't care. We used to wat ch football games with the TV sound down and the radio on, and the announce rs were way better because they assumed you could not see it. Bars were doi ng that and nobody tured them in even though it was a $250,000 fine.
Since that was also unenforceable they invented BMAC and that is when they won the war. They started using that encoding and you could buy a board to beat it, for $11,000. That made it worth it to just pay for it. It was chea per to pay for it.
Things have of course gone way past that now, the system is unbeatable exce pt for the very few who have a very high skill level and inside knowledge. Used to be there were cheater "smart cards" but I haven't heard of them for a while. They sold them, not linked to an account but now if they are not linked to an account they don't work. And the encoding is ridiculous. Recei ve the signal and it looks like noise, it takes specific information even t o sync to it.
I know most of my shit here is historical, but it still comes down to money . The digital age is here, they don't want it so you can just tune in a fre quency and even make a phone call. Remember dialtone theft ? When you had 4
6/49 Mhz cordless phones people would come up your driveway and call their relatives in Cube or Nigeria or some other east bumfuck. you get the bill. Then they put in a digital circuit to require a "handshake" for the base to operate.
Two things happened. they now have dedicated Sputniks with alot better batt eries and alot more power and I bet they are semi-directional to just cover a certain area and they got another one for another area. Plus I was ridin g with my ex-boss one day and saw two dishes on one house, which in and of itself it not that unusual, but they were pointed different directions. I a sked him if what was up with that. He said one of them is the Arab network. I didn't realize they still did that but I have noticed some censoring of the news, like taking stations off that the people actually want for altern ative news sources. Cable companies do it as well.
In the old days you had motors to move the dish to pick up a different Sput nik, but they are all fixed now. them days are over. Also, in the old days I lived in Lakewood, Ohio and we had an RCA TV with the CTC25 chassis with a nuvistor in the tuner RF stage. I used to watch CFPL from Canada, and I kinda liked watching their news. Well with digital TV them days are over. T hey got nowwhere near the range. Control of information.
If you don't want to put the political aspects of all this in your material fine, but I thought I would mention it.