Gringo’s Travels
Puerto Rico viewed from a gringo’s perspective
Satellite Dishes are Everywhere
Author: The Gringo29 Apr
One thing that you will notice driving down the residential streets of Puerto Rico are the satellite dishes. Everyone has them. Let me take that back, I mean everyone has 2 to 3 of them. For the longest time I had no idea why. When I asked people most of them would tell me “because we get a bad signal”.
Then one day one of my coworkers got a few dishes. He found Free to air. With this setup you are basically pirating satellite signals legally… It is a big gray area. The sat. companies hate it and are always reprogramming the signals to screw with everyone. It’s a pretty cool setup that can you get a gazillion channels. It definitely not cheap. I would think of it wore as an investment of say $600 that might go belly up when the Satellite companies figure out how to stop the piracy. Now in his spare time that is all he does is setup these boxes on the side making a killing on installation and reprograming the boxes (that can’t normally get the signals).
So now when I drive by all of these houses with the dishes I think to myself “I can’t believe all these guys are screwing the system”. In a way it’s pretty cool that every one is screwing the man. In a way it sucks, because that is what so many Puerto Ricans do here is try to screw the man. Chaos everywhere…
- Tags: grey area, Puerto Rico, satellite dishes, signals
3 Responses for "Satellite Dishes are Everywhere"
That is not legal at all because they are decrypting the satellite signal and thats illegal since the DMCA. There are true FTA free channels, but most people just pirate the signal and ignore those channels. Another thing is that the equipment is not that expensive, $600 is way too much, it really depends on what you want, there are equipments as cheap as $130 and you get the same thing, and with Viewsat you also get awesome quality :).
Your friend is taking a huge risk by setting up the boxes. I do it for myself and my family but never for a stranger, and never for money.
Just a note, this is not a Puerto Rican thing, if we do it here its because it was already a widespread behavior in the USA. You might not notice the dishes there but that is just because they are smaller.
I know it can’t just be a PR thing. I must say in TX, from what I have seen, is the people that use a dish typically use just one. I can’t say I knew anyone doing this either. Well not that I know of.
In USA most people use one dish because the satellites are right above the USA and with one dish you can get both of them. Since we are in the Caribbean the satellite signal is weak, hence we have to use bigger dishes and one for every satellite we wish to receive.
I struggled for some time to get both satellites with one dish and is just not possible. My father has like 4 dishes on the roof and every time I go home I feel I am in some kind of military base lol
Leave a reply