Swiss Satellite
Pioneers.
(Dane K)
EARLY DAYS IN SWITZERLAND
Switzerland was never the greatest country for
TV. In the late 70s our area (at the foot of the Jura mountains) could pick up three
channels with a TV aerial: Swiss German, Swiss French and, slightly weaker, Swiss Italian.
By using a booster, we then managed to get ARD from Germany - sheer joy! You see, at the
time, Swiss German TV's idea of Saturday night entertainment consisted of getting five or
six politicians around a table and giving them one microphone and a subject to talk about.
It was dull, no heated arguments, no insults and the strongest phrase you ever heard was
"I disagree". The entertainment lay in watching the politicians trying to
surreptitiously slide the communal microphone closer.. By the early 80s VCRs had come into
being and Saturday night entertainment improved.
Then one day we watched a short interview on the news with a chap from London who had the
idea of putting a TV satellite in orbit. I can't for the life of me remember his name (I
think it began with an "L") but we found out his telephone number in London and
called him a couple of times. He was a true visionary and told us that there would soon be
hundreds of channels beaming from the skies. He had sunk everything he had into the
project and was still being mocked by the bosses of terrestrial TV stations in England.
As soon as "Sky Channel" (nothing to do with today's BSkyB) was up and running
on the first "Eutelsat" and the German channel RTL about to follow suit, we
decided to lash out a small fortune on a 1.20 metre static dish in the mid 80s. There was
no such thing as private satellite equipment in Switzerland at that time, so with
the help of a friend of mine from Swiss French TV, we bought one from a company only a
mile or two over the border in France. The price of £2,000 (!) included a huge, black,
heavy ProSat receiver, oodles of cable, customs, transport and installation by two
technicians who delivered the system from France.
Trouble was, at the time, we were the only people in the country with a private dish and the Swiss PTT (Post Office, regulators of TV licencing) didn't quite know what to do with us. At first the chap I spoke to at PTT Head Office suggested 12 Swiss Francs (£5) a month *per channel* but warned us that we were not allowed to watch RTL, because no agreement had been signed between the Swiss and the Germans! But the official in Bern had a good heart and suggested we "store" the dish discreetly behind the house until the following September, as a new pricing system would be introduced then - 96 SFr (about £40) per year irrespective of the number of channels we could receive. They were also interested in the system itself as they had no experience of private installations.
Partly for this reason we had little problem getting "planning" permission from our village's council to install the dish on the roof of our old farmhouse. The rafters were 100 years old with permanent lodgers in the form of woodworm, so we reinforced that area of the roof to be on the safe side. The sight of the dish was a 9 days wonder in the village and has since become a local landmark ("we live four houses after the big satellite dish" etc)
Super Channel had also started up, so we had two English language channels plus RTL and that was it for a while. A couple of years, two new satellites (Intelsat and Kopernikus) and dozens of channels later, we upgraded to a 1.50m motorized system with yet another huge ProSat box and separate (huge and heavy) positioner. We still have that dish, although it's been upgraded many times over the years, with newer LNBs, a Pace 580 IP, and now a digital system in the living room. The system was always my "baby" - my husband always left the purchase and installation of new equipment up to me. As long as he can switch it on, off and over, he's happy.
And now the old ProSat and positioner, various D2Mac decoders, and a couple of spare Paces fill a cupboard in the attic as a reminder of our days as satellite TV pioneers.
Dane K. (October 2001)
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