Gunter Haag of Antioch used to have a hard time following his favorite teams, especially the soccer team from Lubeck in northern Germany, where the German language instructor was born.
Hoping to find the team’s latest scores, he’d listen to a German language radio program or buy a newspaper. Many times, though, the scores would be ancient history by the time he’d found them.
Recently, he discovered a simpler solution. Haag bought a 5-foot-diameter, battleship gray television satellite dish, which is installed in his back yard and receives German television transmissions 24 hours a day.
Now he watches the Lubeck team on his family room television as easily as watching the Chicago Bears. “All I do is turn on the television and a little black box that looks like a cable box and converts the signal from the dish to my television,” he said. Cable wire from the dish is connected to a converter box near his television.
“The investment was definitely worth it,” said Haag, who spent $900 for the system and watches “about two hours” of German TV daily, including a 30-minute newscast from Berlin, history programs, teleplays and sports.
Haag is one of an estimated 18,000 Lake County residents who, since 1982, have installed satellite television dishes to receive foreign programming, according to Joeseph Herreweyers, vice president of E&E Systems Inc., a Wauconda satellite television distributor.
They’re watching television from Germany, Korea, Japan, Russia, China, Italy, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Greece, various countries in Africa, India, Australia, French Canada and the former Yugoslavia, reported Warren Schoen, owner of USA Wireless Cable of Highland Park.
According to Margaret Parone, vice president of communications for the Satellite Broadcasting Communications Association in Alexandria, Va., 40 foreign channels are available nationwide. In the near future, she estimated, channel capacity for larger dishes will be 1,000 and for smaller dishes 300.
“Sports is an important attraction for foreigners,” she said. “It gives them a home-away-from-home flavor. We’re also seeing increased interest as the population of the country becomes more diverse and the cultural needs of that diverse population must be met.”
Herreweyers and other Lake County satellite dish distributors confirmed Parone’s explanation and listed other factors contributing to the service’s local popularity.
“There’s been a tremendous influx of internationals here,” Schoen said. “I’ve put up 20 to 30 dishes in the last two years for Russians in Buffalo Grove, Skokie and Highland Park. There’s strong demand from Filipinos who live in Gurnee, from Yugoslavians in Long Grove and from Irish in Waukegan. There’s also been a big influx of Italians, Canadians and other foreign nationals working for companies in Lake County.
“They want to see news and information from home,” he said. “It’s just as if I was in China or Moscow and wanted to see WGN-TV from Chicago.” Of the 300 systems he installed last year, 50 percent were in Lake County.
New technology, which has increased power, lowered the price and allowed for much smaller dishes, also has spurred interest, said Steve Buchholz, owner of Professional Satellite Antennas Inc. in Round Lake Beach. Dishes are now as small as 18 inches, and power has been increased for a stronger signal. The lowest price for the larger satellite dishes is $700, down from $4,000 several years ago.
“When the 18-inch RCA dish came out,” reported Jamie Walker, president of Custom Communications Group of Waukegan, “our orders increased dramatically. A lot of people became interested because with the small size of the dish, they could put it on their roofs or camouflage it with landscaping.”
Herreweyers estimated that his firm will install 500 dishes this year, up from 250 last year.
The method by which customers obtain foreign programs is as varied as the number of stations they receive. Most international programming is available only on the 5-foot-plus dishes on the C-Band, Walker said. Some customers pay a subscription fee. Other channels, such as Filipino television, require a special decoder, and some, such as the BBC and TV Japan, are free on some satellites, said Buchholz, the Round Lake Beach satellite distributor.
Learning what’s on and when it airs isn’t as easy as buying a TV Guide. Haag receives a monthly 20-page program guide mailed from Brussels, where postage is cheaper than in Germany.
“There’s a free scrolling guide to TV programming on the big dish,” Buchholz said. “For $400, people can purchase an electronic TV program guide that they can page through.”
For most subscribers, these inconveniences are minor considering what they’re getting: news from home, entertainment without the pressures of translating it into English, and introduction of their children to the parents’ native language and culture.
“With the Bosnian conflict, I liked getting the Greek version of what was going on,” said Lake County Associate Judge James Booras of Gurnee. “It was a different version of the events. The American news showed a pro-Bosnian view. The Greek news showed pro-Serbian. You could watch both and see there were bad things happening on both sides.” “
“My most unforgettable work experiences have involved installations for people who wanted live feeds from Belgrade,” Herreweyers said. “These were people from the former Yugoslavia who had relatives there and wanted to know everything going on. I really felt I was providing them with a lifeline.”
For Zhanet Bartashnik, a Ukraine native who lives in Highland Park, getting Russian TV is “better than a visit to the steam baths for relaxing.”
“Much of my day is appointments that I drive to,” said the advertising salesman for Svet, a daily Russian newspaper published in Deerfield. “When I come home, I’m tired. At night I can put on Russian TV, watch an old movie and not have to put in the extra work translating that I’d have to do with American TV. It’s real rest time.”
Bartashnik likes Russian TV so much she encouraged her parents to install it in their Rogers Park home. “It’s important for the older people,” she said. “Their English isn’t good. It gives them a way to understand what’s going on in the world and keeps them from getting lonely during the day.”
Another selling point for her was the opportunity to expose her 19-year-old daughter, Marina, to Bartashnik’s native tongue and culture.
That same concern about keeping language and cultural traditions alive in the next generation motivated Edwin Martinez, an Abbott Laboratories Inc. coating specialist born in the Philippines and living in Gurnee.
“I bought Filipino TV so that my two children, Nadine, 13, and Neal, 10, could spend time watching Filipino children’s programming and learn the language,” he said. “As a family, we watch a variety show on Sundays with music and comedians. It’s wonderful. I feel as if I haven’t missed a thing by living here, and neither have my children.”
Not all customers are residential users like Martinez, Bartashnik and Haag.
About 20 percent of Herreweyers’ customers are restaurant and bar owners who want foreign soccer games to attract customers.
But schools also are interested. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire recently bought a decoder to receive French and German stations through two satellite dishes, said Todd Slotten, audio-visual coordinator for the school.
Life with international TV isn’t necessarily one clear picture signal of video pleasures, warned satellite TV distributors. There can be some headaches. Before deciding to install a dish, customers should make sure there is an unobstructed view from the dish site to the south to southwest for the best satellite reception, Schoen said. It should be uninterrupted by trees or buildings. “About the only thing that bothers reception is leaves,” he said.
More important, customers should check local community ordinances. “In Grayslake, people living in a subdivision signed a covenant forbidding residents from having dishes,” said Walker, the Waukegan satellite TV distributor. “A customer of ours installed a dish, and the subdivision forced him to take it down.”
Even without these headaches, some people, displeased with other aspects of the service, have discontinued it.
Said Bill Govas, owner of the Country Squire Restaurant in Grayslake, which had Greek TV, “I liked getting the news from Greece because I still have a lot of cousins there and felt I was keeping in touch. But I took it out because the billing system was disorganized. Instead of sending you a bill, the company depends on you to remember to send them payment. I forgot. One day I turned it on and it wasn’t there anymore.
“The price was too high at $250 (a year) for one channel,” he added. “Here in the U.S., for $250, I can get 150 channels.”
But expenses aside, Haag, the Antioch German language teacher, has come to count on the service.
“It makes me feel like I’m there without leaving home. In fact, having German television can be a real culture shock. Sometimes I forget that I’m here in the States while I’m watching it. I’ll get up from my chair to get something to eat, go into the kitchen and realize I’m in America, not back in Germany.”
The numbers
The 1990 U.S. Census showed 19,740 foreign-born, naturalized citizens and 21,843 foreign-born, non-citizens living in Lake County, for a total of 41,583, according to Michael O’Shea, a Lake County Economic Development Commission staff member.
That’s up 40 percent from the previous census in 1980, which showed 29,524 foreign-born. The 1980 Census did not differentiate between naturalized and non-citizens, O’Shea said.
