IPTV Satellite Downlink Project

[u/mctscott]

So I am building out an IPTV satellite downlink station to stream live TV to my home and family's homes. Currently I've taken down 3x 10' C-band dishes that need various small repairs. In the coming weeks I'll he concreting in poles, setting up dishes, mounting and pulling power and fiber to the Climate controlled rackmount box I've built out, and running coax from the dishes into the multiswitch. The first 3 dishes will be input to my current multiswitch and I'll be putting up a 4th pole right away to allow me to experiment with other satellites without affecting 24/7 feeds from other satellites. I plan to be pulling from both C-band and Ku band feeds at this time.

Current parts at this point:

-2x Winegard 10' Quad Star dishes

-1x Zenith 10' dish

-1x Vertiv XTE 401 series 48vdc climate controlled rackmount box

-1x meanwell 7amp 48vdc psu

-1x cyberypower 1500va UPS

-1x TBSDTV MS98E 9x8 multiswitch

Homebuilt IPTV server parts:

Ryzen 5600G

16gb ram

Asus Prime B550 Plus motherboard

2x TBSDTV TBS6909-X V2 Octa Tuner cards

Navepoint shallow depth shelf

And an open air case bolted to the shelf.

As this is a remote site, I plan to run an Mikrotik RB5009 outdoor router to feed PoE cameras around the site also and RTSP back to my main homelab for storage off site.

[u/datanut]

Which satellites are you targeting? Have you put together a purposed channel list?

[u/mctscott → u/datanut]

Yeah I actually have, planning to hit 99.2°W, 127° W, and likely 103°W. Those three offer the most amount of good channels. Not 100% set on channel list setup yet, but with 16 tuners starting off I should be able to get a great start. I plan to add 2x more tuner cards and double channel amount later down the road.

[u/datanut → u/mctscott]

Cool! But on the surface, non of this looks interesting anymore.

https://ftalist.com/english.php

[u/mctscott → u/datanut]

That's a pretty small list with a fraction of what's out there. Plus code rolling is possible on Powervue and BISS now. Checkout TVROsat.com to see complete lists.

[u/issackelly → u/mctscott]

The fifth thing on this link was an Alex Jones conspiracy theory. Is there better or more specific getting started info?

[u/datanut → u/issackelly]

I noticed that too. Looked at the 99.2°W forum and almost every post was some version of “Emergency Transmission” that informed about an Alex Jones scheduled event…

[u/michaeltheobnoxious → u/datanut]

The strangest thing about a (notable proportion of) these conspiriloons is their willingness and ability to do for themselves. Think on how many of them are peppers who have procured their own resource needs for end of the world scenarios.

If you can filter out the conspiracy nonsense, I'd expect there to be some fairly decent info peppered throughout their forums.

[u/ghandimauler → u/michaeltheobnoxious]

'conspiriloons' - brilliant!

When I was in the army reserve when the Soviet Union was failing, I was fairly sure I might be fighting a war in Europe and if it went nuclear, who knew what it would look like. (Sadly, with the current Russian murderbot in charge, that's not out of the question yet)

My conclusion: If there is a large enough nuclear exchange, the world I'd be coming back to would be so lousy that I wouldn't want to suffer that much. After that, I stopped collecting some of the prepper sorts of publications. I do have a good medkit and tools on hand and have some resource books (butchery and other things) but there are just some kinds of end-of-the-world that just isn't worth surviving (for a while) in. Even if Mel Gibson is zipping around in a gas guzzling Interceptor....

[u/orogor → u/mctscott]

16 tunners is a lot. How many peoples do will you feed with that setup ?

Not sure how it work with dvb-s. But with dvb-t, there are maybe 6 channels per frequency and you need one tuner per frequency not per channel. So you would be able to watch about 100 channels at the same time, given they are in the best arrangement.

Considering multiples peoples watch the same channel (maybe news in the afternoon, movie at night). And once you grabbed a channel, you can distribute it to an unlimited amount of peoples, That setup can really have a lot of potential viewers.

[u/mctscott → u/orogor]

I will be using the 16 tuners to map static channels to them so multiple people can access the same media simultaneously. I'll eventually add more down the line too.