new gizmo

Those who know me waaay back know that satellite telvision has always been a hobby. Specifically I like to get the oddball stuff that's up there, mostly just for the sake of doing it. It's great fun to watch the live unedited feeds from a satellite truck on location being sent back to the TV station, for example.

Or to watch television from Cuba, which was tonight's adventure.

I have a Sky Mexico system that I use for watching the equivalent of Mexican cable TV. The same satellite that carries Sky also carries a variety of other channels. It's not like satellite TV in the USA where the satellite provider controls the actual satellite in the sky. Sky Mexico just rents space on Intelsat 9, which is located in orbit at 58 degrees west.

There's some sort of Indian religious channel - the only thing of note was that the guy preaching had a round band-aid over his red dot... I couldn't take but a few seconds of that.

There are a couple of occasional video channels which are used to send signals between North America and Europe. They lit up a couple of times to either show test patterns or scrambled signals I could not display.

Cubavision Internacional is also carried on this bird. It was showing a baseball game live from Havana. The last time I had occasion to watch Cuban TV it was, um, live and received over the air from my hotel room on the Cuban coast. (What can I say, sometimes travel to the Caribbean gets boring and you have to throw in a curveball...)

It was interesting to watch baseball and listen to the commentary. The stands were packed although the crowd was not particularly well dressed, quite unlike an American sports event. The onscreen graphics were great - if it were 1990. When they needed to cut away for a moment there was most certainly NO advertising, they'd just cut to some bombastic video clip about how bush was a terrorist and then hey, back to the game.

The game ended and I was about to make a comment about how their production quality had improved... but then they cut to a propaganda music video showing a lot of anti-American themes.

In playing around with the receiver I found out that my flatscreen TV will do a neat thing: it will lock a signal that's 625 line 25 frame per second with PAL color and display it perfectly. (TV in North America is generally 525 line 30 frame per second NTSC color - the result of a PAL signal being introduced is usually a fuzzy black and white picture that rolls like crazy.) Anyway, this receiver is relatively inexpensive but has features that are not found on most North American electronics. You won't find one of these puppies at Best Buy.

It was a neat evening and it's got my desire increased to get a proper motorized dish outside so I can see MORE. :)

I don't know that I'll spend much more time watching Cuban TV, its crap.