On Thu, 5 Jan 2012 21:10:22 +0000 (UTC), J G Miller wrote:

On Thursday, January 5th, 2012, at 19:22:21h +0000, Mark Carver explained:

There's an uplink dish, fed from an on-board transmitter. However, only a limited
amount of bandwidth is booked on a transponder, bandwidth costs money,
so the minimum that can be 'got away with' is booked.

Ku band presumably?

At the moment, although lots of people seem to be interested in Ka.

The uplink and therefore the downlink would not be encrypted,

They may or may not be. It depends on whether the content is worth
protecting from casual eavesdropping.

so it should be possible to receive the downlink feed on a
suitable satellite receiver.

If you have a suitable dish. You ain't gonna get stuff on a mini-dish.
We're probably talking at least 2m here, so you're into real anorak
territory in a domestic environment.