Building a SatelliteNewsFeed (V1.0) ------------------------------------------------- Report about the process and some experiences. This report is my own work and copyrighted by myself. The price for it is a mail to: infstar@infostar.de Title: SatFeed Body: Your opinion. After reading this report you will know _my_ experience. However you will have more or less or different problems, when you try the same thing. ! Due to the personal nature of this document I cannot guarantee for any correctness ! English is not my native language (I'm living in germany). So excuse my grammer, vocabulary and my desperate trials to add my very special kind of jokes. I am a newbie on the internet. 2 years is not very much - I know. And a lot of you have more experience, than I have. Forgive me and don't laugh too loud, please. (Of course 25 years of programming gave me a bit knowhow.... I'm 40 years old). Juergen Helbing, ------------------------------------ hostmaster@infostar.de Why I've built the satellite-feed: ------------------------------------------ Germany is a poor country. The newsfeeds are very restrictive, Felix Somm is under prosecution, and the german de.*-hierarchie is poor. Commercial NewsFeeds (as Altopia or Zippo) are not available. The prices for bandwidth are high - and so are the costs for leased lines (independant from the baudrate). I've been sucking news for a long time from CompuServe (problems with synchronisation), MSN (no nntp-server), AOL (forget it) and local providers (not much groups). After I've built my own webserver with 24h-connection I've read a lot of news from altopia (http://www.altopia.com), the best newsserver in the free world. But it's too slow for larger amounts of data and cannot be used as a professional news-source. (Very special thanks to Chris Caputo (Altipia) for his long lasting understanding). Additionally a lot of news block out my tiny line (28.8-analog). So I was looking for better methods. A long time ago somebody posted to the newsgroups, that it would be best, to broadcast the usenet like TV or Radio. And really. There were two companies in the US who started a satellite feed for the usenet. NCIT with the PageSat and PlanetConnect. They even announced a service for Europe. In December both had a european service. I decided to begin. But X-mas was faster.... :-) How I purchased: ------------------------ In January I read in the newsgroup, that PageSat stopped its Service and PlanetC offered them a cheap conversion. OK - I decided to order at PlanetC. Their WebSite is poor, so I asked them for a demo-access to their newsserver. I GOT IT! (After I told them the real Name and IP# of my test-client). The server was not too bad. So I wanted to order. Helas. No Email-Order. They wanted a FAX? Fortunately there was an old fax-machine, so I ordered it. ! I ordered the _complete_ package. Feed-license (UseNet only), Receiver, Dish, MountingSet and LNB. I hoped, that it would all work perfectly together, when I get it from one company. I've got a conformation my Email. And two weeks later the receiver and the software arrived. Oops. Very fast I thought. (Most deliveries from the US to Germany are perfectly fast). Customs was made automatically. Then I waited for my dish. And I waited. And I waited. Then I mailed to PlanetC. No response. Then I mailed to PlanetC. No response. Then I called PlanetC the first time. Really nice people there. They explained me, that the dish and the LNB would be delivered from the UK to Germany - because the transportation-fee across overseas would be too much. And they asked me to wait a little bit longer. Two weeks later I called them again. And they told me, they would care about it. And they DID. One week later (8 weeks after order) the dish arrived. One large and one small package and a metal stand. How we built it up. -------------------------- I know _nothing_ about sat-dishes and I dont have a sat-dish for TV (I have cable-TV). So I was looking for somebody who knows. A friend of mine installs dishes, but was on holidays for two weeks. A company nearby called 'SatTeam' looks very professional. I called them and they came in the evening. They looked at the equipment and wondered about it. They always install TV-dishes. Data-dishes was new for them. But they immediately unpacked everything and found out, that the LNB was on the delivery-list, but not included. I immediately called PlanetC and they told me, that the LNBs are in a different package and would possibly arrive later. :-(( The SatTeam announced to come next morning. The pricing for the installation would be about 500 DM (300 $). And they would try to find a 10.0 Ghz-LNB. This seems to be a very unusual base-frequency for a LNB. When Mr. Ducic (Duric) arrived next morning, he mounted the dish at a wall of our company. The satellite (Orion-F1) os located at south-east (seen from Munich, Germany), very low nearby the horizon. It is located over the US-east-coast. He mounted it really good. And he told me, that the 1.2 meter Channel-Master-Dish is a Mercedes under the dishes . Then everything was mounted and we tried to find the bird. 18 degress elevation over the horizon and 236 degrees (southWest). But no 'lock' on the receiver. So it did not find anything. We checked the position, we checked the LNB. There is a TV-Channel on this bird, too. And we found some TV-Channels. But the PlanetC-Data did not come. We tried a different LNB. Did not work. We tried a LNB with a different base-frequency. Is not possible, because the receiver is limited to 1800 Mhz. And a 9.75-Ghz-LNB move the signal from 11,625 Ghz out of the range of the receiver. OK. I called PlanetC and they told me, that they believe, we did not find the bird (the correct satellite). We tried some more and gave up in the late nite. It was cold and windy. I decided to wait for the correct LNB. Possibly the TV-LNBs the SatTeam has are not appropriate for a bird so low over the horizon. Not sensible enough or simpkly bad. One weeks later the LNB arrived. It was a 9.75-Ghz-LNB. AAaaaarrggghhhh. I phoned PlanetC - and they told me, I would get another one. And I waited. Herbet Krammer and Harald Roelle are my 'Co-Masters' and they wanted the dish in action - as I wanted it. I told them about the fact, that PlanetC thinks, that we did not find the correct bird. We read the manuals and in the dish-manual is mentioned, that the LNB is not positioned to the center, but with an angle of about 26 degrees. We looked to the dish and found it not a circle, but something like a paraboloid. Next morning Herbert and Harry had made some drawings and found the correct angles. They even has moved the dish. But no chance to align it without a spectrometer. So I called Mr. Duric again. He came two days later. The 10 Ghz-LNB arrived exactly in there two days. In a very funny envelope. Not well packed. And it was defective too. The very old (and used) TV-LNB had signals. The new one not. So Mr. Duric wanted to set the dish to the correct position - and I had to wait for the next replacement. And together we found (after hours) the LNB that worked and the Bird. Hoorraayyyy ! Now my dish looks to the floor. The neighbors believe, we are spying them out. I tell them, what we are doing there - and they are satisfied, possibly curious. The Lock-LED on the receiver now showed green light. And the data-leds were flickering. After I installed the software, I've got data from the Decoder-Card, that is mounted in my old 486/66 PC. It works with DMA and this old PC should be able to manage the data-stream. The software is running on MsDos (Later I wanted to move the data via Ethernet to my NT/newsservers. Win/95 should be nice for this) And after the start i saw counting digits for the first time in my life. I smiled. Then I've got a CRC-error, when the file was finished. OK, the manual says that CRC-Errors can occur. Some few a day are normal. What was NOT normal was, that ALL files had CRC-Errors and NO data was saved to my harddisk. We called PlanetC again and they told us, that possibly our NetWork-Card (3COM-3x5c9) had the wrong address. And would conflict with the decoder-card. I checked it, and they were different. I wanted to surrender. Tears in my eyes I resetted my PC. It started again with Win/95 - the normal operating-system of this PC. Formerly I always started just the Dos-Prompt. But this time I went to the next room and came back after one minute. And after 30 seconds my PC starts Win/95 automatically. Just for fun I decided to start the PlanetC-Software from the desktop of Win/95. It's screen appeared and again data came in. Suddenly the message "File saved" appeared. I didn't believe my eyes and I waited the next minute. Again: "File saved".... No more CRC-Errors! Hmmmmmm. It seems, that the Network-Card was in Plug and Pray mode. And the very old PC had no plug and pray bios, so it did not initialise the card correctly. This seemed to cause the problems with Dos-Mode only. But in the DosBox of Win/95 everything worked fine. And so I did until today. All this was on a monday. The weather was fine and the sun was clear. No clouds, no rain. On Thursday in the evening a strom broke out. It rained and a thunderstorm came. I looked to my receiver: The LOCK-LED was red ! In the middle of the nite I climbed to my roof and tried to find out, if the dish has moved. It was not very tight. I could move it about 2 degrees. I tried to move it back, but my red light did not disapear. Frustrated I went to bed. Next day in the morning: Red Led. I tried again to move the dish. No chance. I left everything like it is. In the early afternoon the sun came out. Suddenly the LED went green again and the data began to flow. I believed, that the clouds and the rain were the cause for the failure. But the next nite was clear. And it lost the LOCK again. Next day GREEN came back at 10.am. And it went RED at 10 p.m. Next morning it became GREEN again at 10 am. I called PlanetC, if they had any problems with the uplink. They told me: No problems. I looked for another guy in Germany. Possibly others have the dish already and could tell me, if the problems were in germany only. But I found not one soul. Possibly my old (used) TV-LNB was not stable enough. PlanetC told me something about temperature-drift. And I had the idea, to warm up the LNB. In the middle of the nite I climbed to my roof and warmed the LNB up with my naked hands. And after ine minute it worked again. Next nite I installed a power-supply and a bulp. I illuminated (and heated) my LNB. And this WORKED ! I had news for three days. Then it became too cold. And the LNB failed again. I surrendered. One week later I read in the newsgroups, that there is a company in Germany that supports and distributes PlanetC. The www.onlinestore.de has a website and a phone-number. I call them and Mr. Jany tells me, that he cannot help me, because I'm not his customer. I tell him, that I purchased already in January, and that nobody told me, that PlanetC has a distributer in Germany. I say, that if i would have known of his existance, then I would have ordered with him - because I want a newsfeed - and no trouble. And german support - if possible. I tell him, that I'm wrinting free reports about my experiences and he begins to belive me. When I tell him, that I'm ready to pay him an upgrade from 'US-Service' to 'Jany-Service', he laughs and becomes very friendly. He asks for my type of dish and LNB. Then he tells me, that he ordered special modified LNBs and good dishes here in Germany. I ask him, if he sells me such a LNB. I dont want a new dish. And he agrees. He asks me for a fax-order and I fax the order. 400 DM (235$) for the LNB is not cheap, but fair. He told me that the delivery might take some weeks, because the LNBs are orderd but not delivered to him. OK, I've waited long enough and I hope for warm weather..... (my old LNB still works, when it's not less than 14 degrees celcius ;-) This new LNB arrives two weeks later. It's cold and my old LNB failed. The new LNB must be assembled with some screws. Funny. But not too difficult. I climb to my roof. One week later I've purchased a cheap level-meter (DM 75, $43). It shows signal strength. Not good, but better than blind. I take it with me to the roof. I dismantle the old LNB and connect the new one. In the moment, when I move it to the dish, the level comes and the receiver shows GREEN lock-led. I have a large range where I can move the LNB. Signal is always there. And more than enough. Of course the diameter of the LNB-case and the holder of the LNB does not match. So i use some plastics between them. The LNB now hangs very funny in my dish, but it works perfectly. Since this moement I never had a failure of the LNB again. (And I still have to mount it correctly :-) Wind, Rain, Temeperature: No problems. The receiver-unit runs fine. And I thank to Mr. Jany for his generous offer to sell me the LNB - independant from the order of the feed. But next year, when the feed must be payed again, I will order at the onlinestore. He has earned these few bucks ;-) What I did with the feed --------------------------------- Getting the PlanetC-Feed on the air is one story. What to do with the feed is a different one. PlanetC wrote on their WebSite, that they send about 400 MB Usenet every day, ZIP-compressed. I've sucked newsgroups with my DNEWS-Server on my Win/NT-PC for some month from my provider. Not much volume. The DNEWS-Server sucks just the groups, my employees (and me) are really reading. If groups are not read for n days (default:30), then DNEWS stops sucking them, until they are accessed again. So I had an archive of about 60 days for the 250 groups, that were really read in our house (we have a small intranet with about 40 PCs). I wanted to put the feed from PlanetC to this newsserver. So I built up a small batch that moves (and deletes) the BAG-Files from the Win/95-Sat-PC to my NewsServer, decompresses them and move them to the uucp-in-directory of my newsserver. The job is quiet simple: move s:\newsgrp\*.* s:\newsgrp9\*.* unzip -o s:\newsgrp9\*.* c:\~uucp.in del /q s:\newsgrp9\*.* PlanetC send out two different names of BAG-Files: news####.zip (NewsGroups) and pcbin###.zip (binary Groups) The line: unzip -o s:\newsgrp9\news*.* c:\~uucp.in uncompresses the news only and the binaries are later deleted. This is helpful if you dont want binaries on your newsserver. You will see later why :-) I start this job every 10 minutes (with a scheduler). Then about 1 MegByte came from the dish. And the SatPC does not need too much harddisk-space for it and the uucp-directory on the newsserver is not too large. btw.: I use a different PC for the sat-feed. SO I can shutdown my NewsServer without loosing feed. The Sat-PC buffers it. I believe a good combination. Adding a uucp-feed to DNEWS (4.0k or better) is a simple thing. One line is added to the dnews.conf-file: suck_uucp c:\~uucp.in\*.bag Thats all. And because I wanted all groups, I've set the: cachedonly false I wrote the job, watched it a while and went home to bed. Next morning at 10 I came back. And the news-Server had stopped. It stopped at 6 am. Harddisk was full. And the uncompressed Sat-Feed on the SatPC was 500 Megs. So I made free more harddisk-space. Previously I've had 500 Megs for the news. Now I needed 2 Gigs. Just to catch up with the 500 Megs from the Sat-PC. It took me several hours to manually decompress the files and put them into the newsserver. I was an idiot. Instead of deleting this entire shit, I tried to read it. But at midnite I was ready. I went home. Next morning the disk was full again. I started an expire, but the disk stayed full. I reduced the expiration-date to 2 days. The disk stayed full. Then I used ONE day for expiration. This worked. Just 800 Megs stayed on my disk. For expanding to a second harddisk I added a line: spool2 e:/dnews/spool diskspace2 900 For preventing overflow on the harddisk I've added: autoexpire 90 This starts the expiration, when the diskspace is full with 90%. Actually my expire runs at 2:00 pm. And the last results were: 69%..77% expiration (on a 2 Gigs disk). This is about 1.5 Gigs DiskSpace every day. Its more than PlanetC told me on their website (400 megs compressed). But I'm not unhappy with this :-) Of course one day of expiration is not good. So I've installd a second DNEWS-Server. This one suchs every hour from the main-feeder. And it just reads (and archives) again the groups, my staff (and I) are really reading. This is now more than before: Because it's nice to read alt.binaries.pictures on a local area ethernet-work ;-) (The daily bikini ). But thats OK for me. I wanted to offer me and my friends a complete newsfeed. And I'm satified. Next I will add more diskspace to the newsserver. I believe, that 9 more gigs will be ok. I underestimated the bandwidth of the usenet. 128 kBit seems to be not very much. But 24 hours a day ;-) This is 1.382 Gigs a day. Compressed ;-) But those are Seagate-Problems. Not sat-problems. And I will solve them, when I have some time. There is more information on the PlanetC-Signal. Fido-Files, Fido-Mail, Customer- Information, Weather, Stock-Data,..... I dont use them today. Possibly if I need more fun one day. But this is another story. Prices: --------- Receiver: $988 Shipping: $95 Dish: $230 LNB: $70 Stand: $50 Shipping: $190 Annual Charge (UseNet Only: $600) Installation (SatTeam): $300 Installation (2): $100 LNB (new): $235 PC: (old): $ 0.00 Time: (much): $ 0.00 Sum: $2858 == 4850 DM (1.70 DM/$). Plus some taxes and some customs. URLS: --------- http://www.planetc.com (The Feed) http://www.onlinestore.de (Europe) http://netwinsite.com (My NewsServer) Conclusion --------------- Some things in this reports seems to be easy. In fact it took me 3 month to get on the air. And a lot of hours of hard work. I'm sure, that this report makes it _much_ more easy to install a sat-feed. Special thanks to the PlanetC-Team. They are always friendly - and competent. And the LNB-Problem is not their problem. (In fact it seems to be the "european-disease"-problem). Thank you, Guenter Jany. You helped me a lot. And without you, I would not have a perfectly running feed today. Some CRC-Errors a day are normal. Next I will try to exchange missing files with other PlanetC-users. I already found one, here in Munich, too! It's "knarf", and he was also looking for somebody else using the PlanetC-System. The PlanetC-System is a method to get a nearly full feed directly from the USA. Because the freedom of speach in this country is uncompared and the german government would love it, to lock the UseNet tomorrow, this sat-feed seems to bee the best way to get original news from the US to Germany. Without the large European-providers, who can be set under pressure. When there will be about 100 dishes in Germany in one year, then no lock in the world will stop the free information-flow of the usenet (and PlanetC is able to pay the sat-fees - and this service continues). Independant of all possible problems with criminals and children on the net, I believe, that censorship is the wrong way. It's time that our rights for free information are getting their real value. The usenet will help us with it. And sat-feeds help the usenet. Never, never, never try to install the dish and LNB without experience! Use a company with good people and good tools. A spectrometer is the minimum tool. And be aware, that a dish for data is different from one for TV. TV-Image becomes lousy. Data-Connection simply breaks. After my first experience with the onlinestore, I'm sure that I can recommend Gueter Jany - for Germany, possibly entire Europe. I believe that the SatFeed is great for small companies with ISDN-Connect or DialUp to the internet. And for providers in Europe it gives a faster feed for messages from the US-backbone. Of course a second feed is still helpful for completeness. This report is a part of my series of reports about my growing experience in the net. I hope you appreciate this and pay the price for the document: A mail-response to me. And I would love to hear your own experiences. Juergen, ------------------------------ infstar@infostar.de ------------------------------ 14. May, 1997