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I am in the "country" and only get a few local digital stations. A friend told me about FTA satellite.

It appears that there are quite a few "free" satellite broadcasts available to anyone with the right equipment. Of course they are not the standard channels you would get on pay-satellite, but there are lots of them.

Does anyone here have FTA satellite? If so can you tell me the +/- of it?

Thanks

Never heard of it. Let us know if you learn anything about it.

Best I can offer is Googling Free-to-Air satellite...

http://www.google.com/search?q=free+to+ ... =firefox-a

I considered this last year before I decided on DishNetwork. The C-band/K-band/4DTV equipment for this gets very expensive, and the big dish required would have been too much of a headache to install. You have receivers, LNBs, rotators, switches, etc that become your headache to keep working. The packages that had the channels we would want to watch, would not have been any cheaper than the small dish providers. Sure the picture would have been superior, but we're still on analog TV anyway. The FTA channels weren't very entising to make us want to watch then exclusively. The cons definitely outwayed the pros once I compared. You may conclude differently, but that was my take on it.
If I had the big dish already, or could get one for free, that may have changed my thinking a little, I doubt it though. We have antenna for locals, which we prefer anyways since we don't lose them during storms. And pay around $42 month for 100+ satellite (mostly radio) channels, but the lack of maintenance and compact equipment is very appealing.

If you are referring to C-band satellite reception, I used to have it. At one time it was on the cutting edge of TV reception. Back then you could watch everything free, including all the pay channels available, movies, and sporting events without commercials. Raw news feeds, and you could intercept network feeds to affiliates. It was quite interesting, and you never really knew what you were going to get. All good things come to an end and they started charging subscription fees for all the channels available on cable/Direct TV/Dish network. Finally a lot of those channels became unavailable on C-Band dish.

That being said, as you state there were a lot of free channels still broadcasting on C-band. (just not the usual ones) Everyone has different interests, and there were a few that I enjoyed, but overall for me it was time for Direct TV.