And I guess that satellite feed was Cidera/SkyCache? I have fond memories stumbling across that while scanning transponders on the Sirius satellite at 5 degress East back then. No encryption whatsoever and it didn't take long to reverse engineer the protocol, which was based on UDP multicast, over DVB-MPE. I still remember the packet headers beginning with 0xdeadd00d.

The service broadcast over 200 gigabytes of Usenet news each day. The satellite transponder was almost 1000 times faster (45Mb/s) than dialup, which was just completely mind blowing at the time.

I also remember configuring the INN news server as well, but sorely lacked storage space to carry any binaries.

The whole thing involved writing a FreeBSD kernel device driver for the satellite card, together with a user-space daemon to extract the IP packets from the raw MPEG-2 transport stream, yes it used the same modulation as for TV (DVB-S). All done from my bedroom, when I was 18, with a small portable satellite dish in the window.

Back then the sheer amount of unencrypted IP data out there in the clear on satellite transponders was absolutely incredible to see.

I still have the source code to the FreeBSD kernel driver for the satellite card, and have uploaded it at https://pastebin.com/QegFzVWy

The dish: https://img.kleinanzeigen.de/api/v1/prod-ads/images/43/43ffa...

The receiver card (one on the left): https://www.linux-community.de/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Ab...