The Feed Trackers Guide Book by Gary Bourgois Each month here in Orbit as well as our website, you find the WILD FEEDS list, a compilation of TV shows that you can watch on your dish, often before they make it to the TV networks. You may have run into these interesting signals while randomly tuning around with your dish (we call this SKYSCANNING). Readers often ask just why these special and recurring transmissions occur, and how they might find new programs not yet on our list. While you may not go to the extremes of your humble author, an admitted obsessive Dish Head, there are many ways (and a few secrets we will reveal) to improve your chances of locating new shows that pop up in the Clarke Belt every month. Using this article as a beginning guide, you may find yourself becoming a master feed finder, while at the same time learning more about the broadcasting industry, not to mention have great fun with your C band dish. Yes, most wild feeds are on C band. Ku will give you access to a few additional feeds, especially those of NBC on GE-1 (W1). For the vast majority of feeds, any reasonably operating dish will work, from the most ancient 70Mhz style receivers, to the latest whiz bang system. In fact, because the new 4DTV system from GI also tunes analogue systems, you don't have to give up your Wild Feeds when you upgrade to the new digital systems. So how do you begin? By examining our monthly list (starts on page XX) you might notice a few patterns emerging. Feed chasers learn these patterns, and are thus able to predict with some accuracy where a new show might pop up. It won't take you long to notice that the bulk of the Wild Feeds happen on two major central arc satellites, T5 and G4. These two birds, as well as T4 are primarily used by the television industry (as G5 and C3 are primarily used for subscription cable programming) As you become a dish head, you will find that every satellite in the arc has a "flavor" to it, determined by the primary users. In the industry itself, these "flavors" are called "neighborhoods". G3 is a "Backyard Dish Owner Neighborhood" where you will find shopping channels, the Gospel Network and a few others who actually exist for the dish owners. These programmers know the fact that C BAND IS NOT DEAD. Millions of dish owners would never trade their full arc BUD (Big Ugly Dish) for DSS because they like the variety and the free programming. And one of the biggest lures we know of is the existence of the wild feeds. Come on now, admit it.... How many times have you told one of your non dish owning friends about a show you saw on Satellite well before they would have the chance to see it on their TV, no matter if they have cable, an off air antenna, OR one of the pizza pan sized dishes. While the Direct To Home satellites have advantages to people who just want to watch regular TV, your big dish will always bring you more, and we personally feel that because the nature of wild feeds dictates that they be universally receivable by many different stations, they don't scramble them, and the costs of converting to digital (especially when the Broadcast industry has no single standard scrambling system yet) dictate that wild feeds will be in the clear for years to come. Exactly why do wild feeds exist? There are a few major types of feeds. Let's examine just a few: 1. Syndicated Affiliate Feeds Shows like Deep Space Nine are not network broadcasts, but rather syndicated Programs. The idea here is that the program producer (In this case, Paramount) sells the program to local TV stations. These may be independent or network affiliates in various cities (Markets) throughout the USA and Canada. In the days before satellite delivery, videotapes, even films were mailed to the individual stations. You can imagine how expensive this process was if a lot of stations picked up a program. A clever process called "Bicycling" was employed. Station "A" would receive the show on tape, play it on the air, then mail it to station "B" and So on down the line, till all of the stations in that group had played the show. This method worked well for the old well-worn standby shows like the Andy Griffith show and Mayberry RFD. It would never do for something like a first run thriller, where everybody in the country wants to follow the show. So the syndicators jumped into satellite delivery. Local stations thus are able to record the weekly shows, for playback at a time that the local station finds convenient in their schedule. 2. Network Pre Feeds Networks, especially smaller ones like FOX and UPN run their entire evening schedule at an earlier time so that stations can record, as well as preview the broadcasts. 3. International (Clean) feeds By far the favorite of dish heads, these are pre-feeds of major shows that have been sold to networks in other countries, such as Canada. The most notable thing about these feeds is that they have NO commercials. You can therefore watch the X-Files at 7:30 Saturday morning, A day and a half before it shows on FOX, and as a bonus, you see the entire one hour show in 45 minutes (Yes, there are 15 minutes of commercial time per hour now). Watching the X-Files this way makes it seem more like a movie than a TV show. 4. Prefeeds for Station Review Every now and then, a network such as CBS, ABC or NBC will air a "controversial" episode of one of its hit shows. So as not to cause problems in some communities, the program is fed early (without commercials) allowing the station managers the choice to carry the broadcast, or run something else instead. Because these feeds don't happen every day, they are called OTO or One Time Only feeds. To catch one of these feeds, you have to be lucky or very determined. It helps to have a friend at a network TV station. Well now you know why they exist. Now how do you find them? A good place to start is the Orbit Monthly Wild Feeds list. This will show you which transponders are in common use. Fox and Paramount have known transponders they use for their pre feeds. Other syndicators are similar. You may run into a block of talk shows, or you may find five episodes of a series run back to back. We call this a (5x) feed. This makes it easy for the TV stations to have all the shows for a week of broadcasts all on one tape with a minimum of fuss. Of course if it happens to be a show YOU like, you can do the same, and make your own videotapes of certain series that you may be collecting. With your Orbit Wild Feeds list in hand, make notes of programs you see, and when you find a show that is not listed, make note of it for your own use. We will probably find it ourselves for next month's list. Start your own log of feeds that you have found that are not on the Orbit List. While we make every effort to have the most complete list in the industry, we do our list the same way the other magazines do, by actual observation. The networks do not make this information available EXCEPT to their affiliates, and we don't list a show unless it has been in the same place at least 2 weeks in a row. Why do some feeds not air at the time the list shows? There are a few reasons why your favorite feed might be missing in action. 1. The network will be running a special show during the time YOUR show usually runs, so no feed is needed. Another Possibility, 2. This week's broadcast may be a rerun. In most cases, there is no need to play reruns syndicator feeds; the networks save the tapes. 3. Your favorite show has been cancelled by the network. How can you tell which it is? TV Guide is a good source of valuable information for the feed finder. They tell you which shows are cancelled, and you can also take a quick glance at the program grids during the time you know a particular show is going to air. If instead of your show you see "Great Caesar's Ghost Charlie Brown" or some other show title, then you know why the wild feed did not air. Try again next week, using the TV guide to see if the show is back on or if it is a rerun (R). How do the big guys do it? The true feed finder is an obsessive dish head (I plead guilty) who usually has more than one dish, a number of VCR's and a bank of receivers and monitors dedicated to the challenge. There are more of us than you think. Tracking wild feeds is something you can actually get hooked on to the point where you want to know where they ALL are. When I got my first dish about 10 years ago, I started several little notebooks of lists of channels, feeds, audio, data and just about every signal I found on the birds. When handling the paper got out of hand, I went to my DOS computer and wrote some code in DBASE 3 to handle the deluge of information. This program finally developed into a very complex piece of software that allows all types of sorts, automatically checks for errors and conflicts, and allows all types of searches and reports. This assists in the task of tracking feeds. MORE MORE MORE In addition to multiple dishes, signal splitters and more than one receiver per dish, all tuned to known feed channels, you have to look at it all. I personally accomplished this end by installing my own in house distribution system on UHF TV channels, with a mini head end in the satellite room, and multiple viewing sites with several monitors so I can watch up to 8 channels at once (There are actually 16 channels in the distribution system, but some are dedicated to NEWSFEEDS (well that's another story). Armed with the latest printout of the list, I get up from whatever I am doing on the hour and half-hour and note any changes. If actually near a receiver, I still take time to do it the old fashioned way, just hit the up button and look for PROGRAM SLATES beginning at 10 minutes before the hour and half hour, right up to show time. You can do it with one or two dishes if you are up to the challenge of mad transponder surfing; many of the best feed finders I know do it with one dish. But a guy (or gal) has got to sleep SOMETIMES! Well, what do you think they made VCR's for? How about sitting on a known feed transponder and recording for 8 hours while you doze. The next day you can quickly scan the tape and make note of what was on at every half-hour. This can be very handy. Obviously you will need to load up another 8-hour tape while you go to work. Scan it when you get home. In short order you will get a big picture of the sky, and the uplinkers will be like friends and family to you (just don't EVER call and bug them, they are busy and they don't do this stuff for dish heads. Remember, we are watching private feeds not really intended for our use, but thanks to the TVRO Home Viewers Act, quite legal for us to watch) Now you are armed with a few secrets of the Wild Feed Hunter. Next time you have your remote in your hand, why not tool around on T5, G4 and T4. You never really know WHAT you will find. Keep watching the Skies.