Shortly after his father's retirement in 1970, the family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where MacDougall was educated at American Heritage School. He is the youngest of five children to building contractor Robert MacDougall and his wife Thelma, a homemaker. MacDougall was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. Amateur radio license suspended for 1 year.One such protest was by members of the Satellite Television Industry Association, who converged on Washington, D.C., in March 1986 to urge the United States Congress to protect access to satellite transmissions. Dish owners began protests over keeping free access to broadcasts. closed their stores as a result of a reduction in dish sales, caused by the rise in signal scrambling. Several satellite dish dealers across the U.S. HBO also advised viewers that purchasing a descrambler for $395 ($933.80 in 2020 dollars) would (along with the monthly fee) allow them to continue watching HBO. When Home Box Office (HBO) began scrambling its signal on a 24-hour basis on January 15, 1986, it offered subscriptions to home dish owners for $12.95 per month ($30.61 in 2020 dollars), which was either equal to or slightly higher than what cable subscribers paid. Fees for home dish owners were often higher than fees paid by cable subscribers, despite dish owners being responsible for acquiring and servicing their own equipment. Many satellite dish owners faced the prospect of having to purchase descrambling equipment at a cost of hundreds of dollars, as well as having to pay monthly or annual subscription fees to cable programming providers. In the mid-1980s, controversy erupted in the cable programming world as American media companies that owned pay television channels began scrambling their programming and charging fees to home satellite dish owners who accessed the same satellite signals that cable operators received. This was not illegal at the time, and restaurant and hotel chains made use of this technology to distribute programming to guests and patrons without charge. Starting in the 1970s, a small community of satellite television enthusiasts (mostly engineers) shared the technology and knowledge of how to construct satellite dishes, as well as how to access pay television from the airwaves for free. When the industry began charging viewers for access to premium services via cable, free broadcasts continued. The Automatic Transmitter Identification System was also developed in response to this incident.īackground Scrambling of satellite transmissionsīeginning in the late 1920s, when the first experimental transmissions began, broadcast television was delivered for free over local frequencies in the United States. § 1367), making satellite hijacking a felony. As a consequence of the incident, the United States Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 ( 18 U.S.C. The jamming received much attention in the U.S., with one executive dubbing the intrusion an act of "video terrorism". Under an agreement with the prosecutor, he plea bargained and was sanctioned with a $5,000 fine, one-year unsupervised probation, and a one-year suspension of his amateur radio license. After the FCC identified the transmitters and stations equipped with the specific character generator evidently used during the broadcast signal intrusion, MacDougall surrendered to the authorities, after which he was served with a subpoena due to a tourist having overheard him discussing the incident on a payphone off Interstate 75. Resulted in the development of the Automatic Transmitter Identification SystemĪlthough the intrusion was a minor annoyance to viewers, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), with assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), investigated the jamming. To protest against charges for access to scrambled satellite channels Message seen in 1986, as superimposed on the SMPTE color bars
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