Geostationary satelite reception of Netnews

[Lauren Weinstein]

The "netnews" that is on the WTBS satellite vertical interval
is controlled by, uh, me.  It's part of the Stargate experiment
that I developed to test the various issues surrounding transmission
of netnews-type materials in a broadcast-type mode.  Note that at
this time I do not have current netnews data running, though some
selected current materials may appear in the fairly near future.
Right now about a 100 or so demo messages from some months ago
circulate endlessly.

The encoding system used for the data is considered proprietary
by the satellite carrier (I don't even know the details) and in 
any case will be changed in the fairly near future to an encrypted
system as part of an upgrade to newer decoding equipment (which
also has built in ECC functionality).  As a practical matter, even
without encryption, extracting the data in a meaningful way is
a lot of work without access to the appropriate (proprietary)
LSI chips.  Not impossible, but probably not worth the effort.

--Lauren--