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RIP: Weather Channel Analog Feed, Videocipher II Tech, and Shepherd's Chapel Analog

S

stdjsb25

http://www.satelliteguys.us/xen/threads/the-weather-chanel-c3-13-leaves-analog.338956/

http://www.shepherdschapel.com/satellite-specifications.htm

For those of you who have had, or still have BUDs, one of the last vestiges of analog satellite technology has died off as of this past June 26th.....the Weather Channel's analog feed......and with that, the Videocipher II lineage that came into being 28.5 years ago when HBO turned it on full time. TWC was the last Videocipher II service.

And on a related note, the Shepherd's Channel is ending its analog service on August 1st.

After that, we will have C-SPAN and QVC left in analog.....but for how long.
 
We are talking about the national C-Band feed of Weather Channel in analog form. Still on I think in 4DTV digital on the big dish but not in analog anymore. Man has C-Band died the past several years in analog. It was only 20 years ago that the Galaxy 5 satellite had all the major channels (plus Playboy), there was endless feeds of syndicated shows, up to several days in advance and network shows in analog along with news feeds and event feeds, all in the clear, more networks like Game Show Network were on the Galaxy 7...Already been over 28 years since HBO went Videocipher II in analog, the first network ever to scramble their signals on C-Band (blame Captain Midnight for that). If your cable company didn't cover networks like A&E, the *old* TLC (which in the mid 1980s shared with Home Theater Network), etc. you could likely go to the big dish and watch them without paying for cable. Then all the Denver station on Satcom F1 nuff said.

-crainbebo
 
Actually, this does mean that some of TWC's older Weather Star models no longer work, particularly the 4000 (released in 1990) and the XL (1999). The 4000s received their weather information from the bird. The XL was the first to use an Internet connection, but I think NWS statements still came off the bird. Both are done for good. There were some 4000s in service for very, very long periods of time.
 
Raymie said:
Actually, this does mean that some of TWC's older Weather Star models no longer work, particularly the 4000 (released in 1990) and the XL (1999). The 4000s received their weather information from the bird. The XL was the first to use an Internet connection, but I think NWS statements still came off the bird. Both are done for good. There were some 4000s in service for very, very long periods of time.
Click to expand...

Pretty much any Weatherstar system that relied upon the C3-13 analog feed is now DOA. That, and when General Instrument/Motorola came out with Digicipher II/4DTV, that was the beginning of the end of the Videocipher. They haven't made new decoders for Videocipher in about 15 years, and a little over 5 years ago Motorola stopped authorizing the consumer decoders....but then again they didn't have that many services left in analog Videocipher....TWC and 2 ESPN services. If you look at it from a cost standpoint......Videocipher was nearly dead. The commercial decoders/encoders were probably a pain to upkeep. I wouldn't be surprised if TWC"s uplink used a VCII encoder that still had "Property of HBO" stenciled on it :-D. That and TWC and their corporate overlords at NBCUniversal/Comcast can take that one transponder and use digital compression to provide several versions of TWC on one transponder.
 
So any Weatherstar 4000 still running (in small cable systems) are pretty much blank on the local on the 8s anymore? The end of a long era. RIP Weatherstar 4000 1990-2014!

-crainbebo
 
crainbebo said:
...Already been over 28 years since HBO went Videocipher II in analog, the first network ever to scramble their signals on C-Band (blame Captain Midnight for that).
Click to expand...

HBO was already scrambled when "Captain Midnight" took out their feed.
 
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