I got the big dish in 1982.
Near the middle to end of the nineties there was true ala carte and you could build a package channel by channel.
But because of piracy and the advent of the little DBS dish the big C-band dish faded away.
I was an early adopter and my first equipment was primitive.
The actuator that moved the dish was actually a saginaw lift used on RVs. It used a DC motor connected to a toggle switch. To move the direction of the dish, you pressed the toggle switch up or down which reversed polarity and therefore direction. You located the satellite by picture and you had to know which transponders on which satellites were active and tune to that transponder when locating a satellite or you would just sail on by.
There were a lot a channels with a lot of different stuff on them.
In some ways it foreshadowed the internet as I became a slave to technology.
Today most folks are slaves to technology, at least those with smart phones.
Yep, I remember searching g for the right dish position, and finding channels along the way that I didn’t know existed- then when it was I. The general position, there was a fine tune adjustment to really zero in- was a bit of work, but it saved us many hundreds of dollars a year. The dish was so large that it would fill with snow and not move, and we’d have to go out and shovel the snow out lol.