Free to air satellite television in USA?

[stephanhodges]

Does anyone know about this or have gotten this? Does one need to purchase a satellite subscription, or just hardware?

"Free to air satellite television on Galaxy 3C and Telstar 5 provides North American students of Chinese with over ten channels of Chinese language television from the Chinese mainland, Taiwan and Los Angeles. Called small ears (xiao erduo) in Chinese, these small ku-band dishes available from vendors such as Smallear Satellite and Smallear.com are great for students of Chinese! Many PRC national network radio broadcasts are available online from the Chinese Central Broadcasting website."

(Quoted from US Embasy site about Beijing bookstore reviews, studying, etc. at http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/sandt/bjbkwrm.html

[Quest]

Try this: http://www.newcosmos.com/index.htm

http://www.newcosmos.com/q&a.htm

CCTV4 converted to 小耳朵 sometime ago in america, and I remember reading something about it, and I think once you buy the hardware there's no subscription fee required. I am not sure though.

[stephanhodges]

Thanks.

Unfortunately, I can't read anything on that page. My studies are limited to pinyin so far.

[sky888]

Stephen,

For years and years, I have always tried to keep ChineseTV in the house for the wife. If it was in the sky, we've watched or subscribed to it. Sometimes, these pay channels unscramble their channels and just leave them free to air. Moving the dish around(when channels change satellites), typing in new frequencies, and finding channels has always seemed a little hobby in itself.

What you would need is at least a 3ft KU band dish with a digital KU LNB and a digitial receiver capable of typing in or scanning frequencies.

Here are some websites that you may want to look at(some information may be out of date due to the nature of satellite feeds):

http://www.lyngsat.com

http://www.lyngsat.com/america.html

http://members.tripod.com/wxie/sat.htm

http://www.wsat.com/cc.html

http://www.wsat.com/home.html

http://www.sadoun.com/

http://store.yahoo.com/hightech/mpeg2dvb.html

http://www.smallear.com

When you are looking at lyngsat, the frequencies above 10k are all KU band feeds.

The places that you will find Chinese TV these days that I know about are:

CCTV channels on KU (http://www.lyngsat.com/g3c.html/FREE)

Dish Network (Mostly Mandarin channels/PAY) **offer the most channels and the best IMHO

DirectTV (Mostly Cantonese/PAY)

PITV channels on KU Band (http://www.lyngsat.com/g13h1.html/PAY)

ETTV America channels on KU (http://www.lyngsat.com/ia5.html/PAY, a couple free channels, also found on Dish Network)

We are currently paying for 20+ channels on Dish and they are the best I've seen yet. If you have any questions, just PM me.