I installed a TVRO satellite system in the 1980s so I could watch NASA Shuttle launches and Star Trek network feeds in stereo. It was also fun to watch newsfeeds when those were transmitted in the clear.

My Big Ugly Dish (10 foot BUD) fell into disuse as other interests beckoned.

Satellite TV is somewhat different today. Actuators (jacks) are mostly out, diseqc switches and multiple feedhorns/dishes in. Polarotors are out, horiz/vert polarization is now controlled by switching supply voltage to LNBF The electronics are much cheaper.

Only a few channels are analog. The rest is digital.

I decided to get a TBSDTV PCI card to get the new signals. A standalone receiver is easier to work with, but a PC card is more versatile, especially with two terabyte hard drives going for $100.

The TBSDTV 8920 PCI S2 card came with drivers and two viewer apps, Dvbdream and Blazevideo. Dvbdream is more flexible, but Blaze can generate an array of snapshots. Dvbdream can split recordings into manageable sized files automatically. Dvbdream can stream the video to another computer running VLC.

At first I used Windows XP with these programs. After all, everything works with XP but not Vista or Windows 7. XP was rather unstable running this software, so I tried Windows 7. TBS Dvbdream et al and codecs run fine on 64 bit Win 7 (amazing) Amazingly, the satellite viewing programs worked better under Win 7 and were more stable.

Some hints for using Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit: Turn off the Win 7 sleep timer if you are networking. If you always mount a share, use credential manager to create a permanent credential that will work across reboots.

If you are recording NASA Select and wish to turn off the monitor, disable Dvbdream rendering with Ctrl-K.

The more codecs you have, the better chance you will have with problem channels. The Nvidia codec on a Nvidia GE 210 gives stunning video quality on NASA Select HD. 
Some handy files to have!  (Be sure to get the latest version)

-rwxr-xr-x 1 caf omen  2091544 Sep 18 14:45 CoreAVC 2.0 Professional Edition.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 caf omen   388310 Oct  6 09:29 DVBDream_Satellite_Transponders.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 caf omen  4966979 Sep 13 09:21 FastSatfinder2.7.0_Setup.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 caf omen  5343541 Oct  3 13:46 ffdshow_rev3562_20100907.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 caf omen 21499328 Sep 28 16:20 mpcstar_4.9_setup.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 caf omen  4574673 Sep 30 02:40 mpeg2_decoders[1].v2.02.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 caf omen  6235360 Sep 14 02:37 ProgFinderSetup2.23.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 caf omen  1606067 Sep 17 14:37 tbs8920driver.rar
-rwxr-xr-x 1 caf omen 19657194 Oct  6 10:34 vlc-1.1.4-win32.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1 caf omen  11M Oct  5 12:25 VideoReDoPlus-2-5-6-512b4.exe