#HACKING DISH TV FULL#
#HACKING DISH TV TV#

I live in a 60 foot long mobile home not far from a busy Street with a lot of traffic and also not far from a train with my house in between. Patience is a must.ДЄbout this article on the repurposed satellite dish parabolic antenna. You will need to play with the antenna alignment to find the signal and fine tune it for maximum signal. It is a lot easier to find your neighbor's wifi signal than it is to find a cell tower 3 miles away. Also, the further away the signal source is the more difficult the alignment will be. Even moving the dish an inch or two in either direction can make you go from no signal at all to five bars. Keep in mind that dish antennas are very directional. This is the line you must point towards the signal source (wifi router or cell phone tower). Notice this line is a bit offset from the center. The other line shows the 'actual view' of the dish. That is not where the dish is 'looking' so don't try to use that to align the dish. That one comes right off the front of the dish. In the graphic there is one line that shows the apparent view of the dish. This means the dish doesn't 'look' where it would seem to. The problem is that satellite dish antennas, like the one I use, are of the offset design. Even trying to explain this without a lot of complicated math formulas is a bit difficult. You would think it would be simple to align a dish antenna with a signal source, but it isn't. After some tweaking I found several really strong wi-fi signals that I could not get without the dish thanks to some really great neighbors with unsecured networks. I mounted it on the pole the other dish came off of. I had a friend give me another old dish that I used for wi-fi. It was also a great way to recycle that old satellite antenna that would have ended up in the trash otherwise. It isn't an ideal setup but it worked and it didn't cost me anything. Using a blue tooth headset really worked well. I no longer missed calls and I didn't have to leave home to talk on my cell phone. To my surprise, I got two to three bars inside so long as I pointed the dish at a double window in my living room. With aluminum siding on the house I have problems even getting a television signal using a rabbit ear antenna. The next test came when I took the assembly inside the house to try it. Just to make sure I made a call using speaker phone and found that this thing truly did work.

#HACKING DISH TV FULL#

I went from no signal to full signal and had not spent a dime or changed anything on my cell phone. I was amazed to find that I got full signal in one direction. I grabbed some wrenches, took down the dish and held my cell phone next to the antenna's horn and pointed the dish in various directions. It had been left there by the previous residents.

#HACKING DISH TV TV#

While working in my yard one afternoon I noticed an old satellite TV dish on top of a pole in my backyard. I checked into an external antenna for my cell phone but found they cost nearly $50.00 and there was some question about whether they actually work. It was uphill in nearly any direction from there. It was apparent that my problem was my location. Of the three other major carriers we checked, not one could get a signal at my house. I decided to change carriers so I had several friends check out their signal strength while they were visiting me so I could better decide which carrier to go with. I first thought my problem was my cell carrier. The only way for me to get a cell signal at all was to drive over a mile in either direction from where I liveed. When I moved from San Antonio back to rural North Carolina, I found myself completely unable to get a wi-fi or cell phone signal where I lived.