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A long time ago if one had a Dish Network / Echostar access card with the engineering guide byte set, you could see a couple live channels of each of the Echost

A long time ago if one had a Dish Network / Echostar access card with the engineering guide byte set, you could see a couple live channels of each of the Echostar birds in space with key vitals overlaid on the feed. It wasn’t an image of a sat taken by another sat per se, but cameras on arms pointed back at the sat, a satellite selfie so to speak. The engineering guide byte also allowed unrestricted access to all pay per view, adult channels, every local news channel from every US market, dish’s foreign satellite that had a wide breadth of international news channels (100+, from nearly every country on the planet)(iirc that bird was at 63.5 degrees?), and a live image of Dish’s control room with a wall of small TVs showing what appeared to be every channel playing at once.

elteto 3y ago
Was the engineering byte easy to set/change?
- PrairieFire 3y ago
  Yeah, relatively easy. You had to get an iso7816 smart card reader / writer and interface it to a pc. Then use a hex editor to find and flip the necessary bit. Pop the access card back into your sat tv receiver and now the system thinks you’re an echostar satellite engineer with everything on so you can test. This has been dead for a long time, I’m thinking around 20 years ago now, but it was pretty cool to read about and watch from the sidelines back in its heyday when there was an arms race between the sat tv services and folks doing things like this.
codetrotter 3y ago
> with the engineering guide byte set, you could see a couple live channels of each of the Echostar birds in space with key vitals overlaid on the feed. It wasn’t an image of a sat taken by another sat per se, but cameras on arms pointed back at the sat, a satellite selfie so to speak. Wish someone out there has some old VHS or DVD recordings of those and can post them to the Internet Archive and share a link. I love things like that.

elteto 3y ago

Was the engineering byte easy to set/change?

PrairieFire 3y ago
Yeah, relatively easy. You had to get an iso7816 smart card reader / writer and interface it to a pc. Then use a hex editor to find and flip the necessary bit. Pop the access card back into your sat tv receiver and now the system thinks you’re an echostar satellite engineer with everything on so you can test. This has been dead for a long time, I’m thinking around 20 years ago now, but it was pretty cool to read about and watch from the sidelines back in its heyday when there was an arms race between the sat tv services and folks doing things like this.

codetrotter 3y ago

> with the engineering guide byte set, you could see a couple live channels of each of the Echostar birds in space with key vitals overlaid on the feed. It wasn’t an image of a sat taken by another sat per se, but cameras on arms pointed back at the sat, a satellite selfie so to speak. Wish someone out there has some old VHS or DVD recordings of those and can post them to the Internet Archive and share a link. I love things like that.