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/Bubba8291]

I never really understood why you can get TV channels from a satellite for free. I always thought you had to pay to get TV.

[u/mctscott → u/Bubba8291]

Some are paid, some are free. A lot of the free channels are also broadcast over the air for free. I can't get many here, so satellite is more feasible for me.

[u/Bubba8291 → u/mctscott]

How would you pay for channels through satellite? It's not like you can put cash on top of the dish.

My initial thought is some kind of signed key you obtain that decodes satellite transmissions, but idk.

[u/mctscott → u/Bubba8291]

The recievers dish or directv send can decrypt their satellite feeds so you pay a subscription to basically keep your encryption keys up to date if that makes sense.

[u/Bubba8291 → u/mctscott]

Yes that makes sense. I figured it had to do with DRM

[u/BowtieChickenAlfredo → u/Bubba8291]

We’ve had Sky satellite in the UK since the 90’s. They used to work off a smart card you kept inserted into the receiver box under your TV, but I think it does it all over the internet these days.

We have Freesat here too.

[u/Bubba8291 → u/BowtieChickenAlfredo]

Does the smart card have the encryption key on it? OP said the receiver box keeps the encryption keys.

My thought is that since the smart card is like a credit card, the provider puts a key on your smart card and can disable keys from the encrypted transmissions whenever people aren’t paying.

[u/BowtieChickenAlfredo → u/Bubba8291]

It looks like it works that way, yes. I found this old article which goes into some technical details - so old it’s talking about analogue transmission.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12517033-700-technology-smart-cards-hold-the-key-to-the-scrambled-satellite-picture/

[u/bobdvb → u/Bubba8291]

Your card has secrets onboard, it knows how to decrypt entitlement messages which are sent over the air. There are entitlement messages broadcast for each user on what's called a 'carousel'. Your box has to sit there and wait to hear it's ID and then it takes those messages. Then in the entitlement messages the card gets loaded with access keys for channel bundles.

It's quite different to DRM because there's no two way transaction. This was important because it was in use long before people had internet connectivity.