It’s a common refrain that some things that folks could do in the 1980s, they can’t do today. Some things in the 1980s were certainly easier to do. That includes hacking satellite links. Today’s modern encryption and data integrity methods make hijacking satellite signals impractical at best. However, that was not the case for two famous signal hijacking cases from forty years ago.

In the mid-1980s, controversy erupted when companies that owned pay television channels, such as HBO, began scrambling their programming and charging fees to home satellite dish owners who accessed the same satellite signals that cable operators received. Many satellite dish owners were faced with the prospect of having to purchase hundreds of dollars worth of descrambling equipment, as well as having to pay monthly subscription fees to cable programming providers. 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.

When Home Box Office (HBO) began scrambling its signal on January 15, 1986, it offered subscriptions to home dish owners for $12.95 per month. John R. MacDougall, an electrical engineer and satellite dealer from Ocala, Florida was one of those outraged by this situation. John was a satellite dish dealer whose profits declined after the scrambling began. To make ends meet, he took a part-time job at the Central Florida Teleport uplink station (which uplinked services to satellites) as an operations engineer.

One week before the jamming, MacDougall transmitted a color bar test pattern superimposed on HBO’s signal for a brief period. HBO did not investigate this incident, as it had occurred late at night. As a result, very few people had been watching at the time. On the evening of April 26, 1986, before logging off of the system for the night, John swung the transmission dish back into its storage position, which aimed it at the location of the Galaxy 1 satellite, and began jamming HBO’s signal. As a protest against the introduction of high fees and scrambling equipment, MacDougall transmitted a signal onto the satellite that for four and a half minutes overrode HBO’s telecast of the 1985 film “The Falcon and the Snowman.” The five-line text message printed in white capital letters appeared on the screens of HBO subscribers across the eastern half of the United States. It read simply:

As a result of this very public protest, John ended up pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of operating an unlicensed transmitter. He was sentenced to a $5,000 fine, one year of unsupervised probation, and a one-year suspension of his amateur radio license. However, the fallout was much greater than John himself. His jamming lead to Congress passing the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which elevated satellite signal hijacking from a minor offense to a felony. The incident also directly spurred the development of the Automatic Transmitter Identification System (ATIS), which allows satellite operators to trace and identify unauthorized uplink transmissions.

His protest also inspired future intrusions, such as the Max Headroom incidents in Chicago. On November 22, 1987, two television stations based in Chicago, Illinois, were hijacked two hours apart from each other by perpetrators who have still never been identified. Both hijackings briefly sent pirate broadcasts of a person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume, in front of a spinning corrugated metal background (meant to resemble the background often featured in the Max Headroom series), to thousands of homes in the Chicago metropolitan area.

The first hijacking took place during WGN-TV’s nightly newscast. The perpetrators were unable to broadcast any audio. The only sound viewers heard was a loud buzz. The interruption went on for nearly 17 seconds before engineers at WGN-TV were able to regain control of their broadcast tower.

The second hijacking occurred about two hours later, during WTTW’s broadcast of the Doctor Who serial “Horror of Fang Rock.” With nobody on duty at the tower that was hijacked, the perpetrators were able to broadcast audio and stay on the air longer than they did during the first hijacking. As with the first incident, a person wearing a Max Headroom mask made reference to Max Headroom advertisements and other seemingly unrelated topics, before concluding by presenting their bare buttocks to a woman with a flyswatter. At that point, the hijackers ended the pirate broadcast, and normal programming resumed after an interruption of about ninety seconds. [Note that both full broadcasts are currently available on YouTube.]

The broadcast intrusion was achieved by sending a more powerful microwave transmission to the stations’ broadcast towers than the stations were sending themselves, triggering a capture effect. Experts have said that the stunt required extensive technical expertise and a significant amount of transmitting power. The broadcast likely originated from somewhere in the line-of-sight of both stations’ broadcast towers, which were atop two tall buildings in downtown Chicago. While the prank was difficult to accomplish in 1987, it became almost impossible to replicate after American television stations switched from analog to digital signals in 2009.

A criminal investigation conducted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the immediate aftermath of the intrusion could not find the people responsible for the hijacking. Despite many unofficial inquiries and speculation since the hijackings, the perpetrators have never been identified.