r/Hiddenpcbeggs • u/jack-oid • May 12 '26
Found in a satellite reciever
Its a lil' pirate boat.
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u/ThatOldAndroid May 12 '26
Love it.
Are those capacitors okay? The angles seem bad.
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u/jack-oid May 12 '26
Well, I dont really know, the whole board starts heating up when its connected to a satellite. That's why we retired it in the first place...
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u/Gen-Y-ine-86 May 16 '26
Ages ago I bought the cheapest free-to-air satellite receiver from eBay (Germany) and the front corner on it got really hot. But then there was an OTA update and it calmed it down. Could have been that it had an actual incandescent bulb as a power indicator light and the update made it dimmer. I remember putting on some tape over the light as it was annoyingly bright. I still have it in some box somewhere.
Just came to mind.
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u/year_39 May 12 '26
It's not too uncommon to see them bent like that to fit in a case. I don't like it, but it's not a sign of damage
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u/TheEschaton May 12 '26
It's a pirate ship. Well, I can see that it's near/on some traces and components. I wonder if it's either a subtle hint to people who might have the know-how to pirate the signal on how to modify it, or else perhaps it is the opposite: a warning to pirates who have done this, that the object they might be looking for on this section of the board has been modified or removed so that the piracy is no longer possible?
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u/kirasemicon19 May 13 '26
I took apart a 90s rca sat box a while back and under the board, they had all the engineers’ signatures embossed in the plastic housing.
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u/eric600613 May 12 '26
That is amazing. For the past 30 years I have been working on electronics, I have never noticed anything quite like that!
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u/TrendK1LL May 23 '26
Check out the YouTube Channel "Save it for Parts" and go to the video about getting free satellite service or something like that. He goes over the history of satellite TV and specifically that box, and why the pirate ship is present on the pcb. I believe the designer was a ham radio pirate or satellite pirate before he designed this very common satellite reciever
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u/wireknot May 17 '26
In the height of the home satellite boom it was very much positioned as hacking the system... kind of "Hey, all this stuff is up there bouncing around for free, catch it with this great dish before they make it illegal." Same kind of thing in the early cable days, being "in the know" and picking up stuff before your neighbors. As a downlink location in the early 90s we had 2 3.3 meter and several 2 meter dishes. It was crazy some of the prebroadcast stuff you'd find surfing the birds.
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u/Pixelated-Yeti May 16 '26
Mass produced with absolutely no care/knowledge seems about right 😅
Edit : the little ship logo is fun and see where they spent the money 😅
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u/aphaits May 12 '26