[i.h]

There's a house on my estate that still has a BSB dish (not a squarial) attatched to the chimney, I guess nobody's felt it's worth going up there to remove it.

I can go one better, there are houses near me with both squarials and Ionica dishes (an early attempt to break the BT monopoly by doing phone lines over microwave links, claims of cheaper calls and more services etc - defunct within a couple of years of launch, mid to late 90s. Probably didn't help that the town had a third competitor as cable was rolled out

The 5 channel thing is even more odd sounding these days when you realise they had two satellites, each with 5 transponders. One satellite was purely for redundancy. Though that arrangement included the potential to expand the number of channels later on.

The IBA were really engineering their satellite service to terrestrial levels of redundancy even though satellite failures are rare

Wouldn't the satellites be on a fixed frequency/polarisation, especially in those days? It seems ridiculous in hindsight that the IBA insisted on two satellites even though they weren't buying them as they would if it was a transmitter site, that was BSB's job.

The IBA engineering announcements showed some of the impressive gold-plating that they did, such as having reception stations at the edges of the country to monitor reception quality and calculate a real world footprint.

Apparently they did strike a deal to get Ireland's 5 DBS channels, but even then 10 channels was well behind what Sky/Astra were offering by the early 90s (and what cable had been offering even before BSB was around).

The entire DBS thing was a flop, especially once you had the likes of Astra and Eurobird launching without the heavy restrictions on channels and technical standards. I'm not even sure if any other countries ever launched their "official" DBS services, or if BSB was the only one.

Did BSB have aspirations to cover Ireland too or was it simply that Ireland wasn't about to do its own thing - they were already interested in MMDS ("wireless cable") anyway.

I suppose the Scandinavian countries successfully did their own thing - the Marco Polo satellites ended up with them of course, and Telenor still owns its own satellites today.