They sold satellite dishes door-to-door in Colorado in the 1980s, building a satellite company called EchoStar.
Within Syria itself, satellite dishes have given millions of Syrians a tantalising glimpse of the modern world.
Built on stilts, some of the rudimentary houses are topped by satellite dishes, but the scene still somehow feels timeless.
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Its younger sibling, MEASAT-1, is already beaming down a 23-channel network called Astro to subscribers' own satellite dishes.
At Stanford since February, he's also working to distribute computers, cameras and satellite dishes to poor communities in Brazil.
Unlike satellite dishes, their reception was easily disrupted by events on the ground.
Like satellite dishes, they had to be aligned by expert technicians, and could be knocked off target by snowstorms or wind.
Do not, of course, start tuning your pirate satellite dishes just yet.
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Business people in Canada face south, as do their television satellite dishes.
Via the internet, satellite dishes, travel and interaction with a 2m-strong diaspora, its people are painfully aware of the prosperous cosmopolitanism enjoyed elsewhere.
This is Don Quixote tilting at windmills--or maybe at satellite dishes.
When you are on a ship, all telephone, data, and video traffic is carried through a complement of large satellite dishes found on the top deck.
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He said he knows the dangers of returning - the Syrian military are adept, he said, at picking up transmissions from mobile phones to satellite dishes.
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Apart from the obligatory satellite dishes and computers Clarke's home is decorated with photographs of him next to the Pope, the Apollo astronauts and Steven Spielberg.
Tall concrete and stucco villas redefined a stretch of the horizon, while builders trucked in TVs, satellite dishes and boxes of hand-painted tile to decorate the houses.
They spend much of their time watching television, trying to soak up all this diversity through the satellite dishes on the roof of their home in north Cincinnati.
With 19 state-of-the-art satellite dishes, the faith-based and family-themed broadcaster can download more than 50 cable-television channels and deliver them potentially to hundreds of thousands of customers nationwide.
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Satellite dishes and the internet open windows on the world.
Adventurer and rainforest guide Duane DeFreitas surfs the Web by candlelight in the middle of the Amazon, getting online with a hacked-together system of satellite dishes and solar panels.
Satellite dishes protruded from many of the tin roofs.
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From this humble beginning, Broadcast.com grew into a company of 288 employees with offices in 10 cities, which connects users to a variety of radio and television programming through its 22 satellite dishes.
Meanwhile, the America government has no satellite television beamed into Afghanistan, where - as with much of the rest of the developing world - satellite dishes are sprouting like mushrooms after a rain.
Once it became apparent that INSAT-4B was effectively dead, SunDirect ordered its servicemen to redirect customer satellite dishes to point to ASIASAT-5, a Chinese satellite owned and operated by Asia Satellite Telecommunications Co.
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It blamed plastic windows and doors for affecting 83% of at-risk areas, with poorly maintained roads and pavements, street clutter, loss of garden walls, hedges and satellite dishes listed as predominant threats to an area's character.
There were elaborate wooden playgrounds in the backyards and mini satellite dishes on every roof, and each driveway was a smooth carpet of blacktop and there wasn't a sidewalk crack to trip over because there were no sidewalks, and each house had a garage that was so oversized it could have been its own house.
Kelvin Mackenzie, who edited the Sun during the 1980s, says he's angered at the vista of satellite TV dishes on central London council estates.
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The data are sent from the orbiting outpost to NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, which relay it to the satellite reception dishes at NASA's White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico.
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Once all the dishes in one country are pointing at a particular satellite, they are likely to stay that way, and others have little chance of breaking into the market.
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