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Comment by mcgreevy | Hacker News Reader

"Look for satellite dishes. They all point towards the equator. In London, that is roughly south-southeast."

If by "roughly south-southeast" you mean "south" and by "in London" you mean "in the northern hemisphere" :).

Geostationary satellites occupy specific spots over the equator. If you want to catch a satellite from the edge of its reception area, you point the dish quite noticeably eastward or westward. Since the Atlanteans never put up TV satellites, in the UK that means all the dishes are either pointing south or southeast, never southwest. You can often take a surprisingly educated guess at the immigrant ratio of a building just from looking at where the dishes are pointed.

In the UK almost every satellite dish will be a minidish and pointing to 28.2E. Sure a few ex-pats will have dishes pointing at other locations, but they won't be the typical sky dish.

That only really works in the UK though. If I go up to the roof of the building I'm in now, I see some dishes pointing east, some west, and some directly up (well almost)

Well the direction depends which satellite is been tracked on the geostationary orbit.

So depending where you are on Northen hemisphere and which satellite provider are you using your satellite dish points to anywhere between south-west to south-east.

For example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_(satellite)

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