The truth about the Dish

Thnaks for that, I would hope most people watching this would see the comic farce built into the script. But then people are gullible.
It is still a great movie, and is able to capture the spirit and awe the space program created.

Are you saying Star Wars isn't real?!

Bourne + Bond = Best Action Film Award

As anyone working in a technical occupation knows, the engineers in Parkes would never have tried to mislead NASA about their technical problems as depicted in the film. Such dishonesty once discovered would mean the end of the career of everyone involved, if not actual criminal prosecution.

In real life the serious wiring problem Parkes experienced was the explosion of the television scan-converter, which occurred weeks before the Apollo 11 launch, but was only finally fixed after the launch but before the landing on the moon. Of course NASA was fully informed and assisted in the repairs.

The real-life "Dishmaster", John G. Bolton, was a famous pioneer in radio astronomy, first winner of the Jansky Prize, who was Professor of Astronomy at California Institute of Technology before leaving to take over management of the Parkes Observatory as Director, Australian National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Bolton's wife Letty survived him when he died in 1993, so Sam Neill's character being a widower in the film was also not true to life.

This movie did communicate well the grandeur of Apollo 11's achievement. It's a shame they falsified history in doing so. Regrettably that seems to be something that movie makers almost always do.

The guy that authored that web page sounds like a right miserable sod.

The OP's website seems a mix of the truth and sour grapes. From the Parkes Observatory page of Wikipedia: "In the first few minutes of the broadcast, NASA alternated between the signals being received from its two stations at Goldstone and Honeysuckle Creek, searching for the best quality picture."
[NOTE: it is generally agreed that the images of Armstrong's first step onto the moon's surface came from Honeysuckle Creek]

"A little under nine minutes into the broadcast, the TV was switched to the Parkes signal. The quality of the TV pictures from Parkes was so superior that NASA stayed with Parkes as the source of the TV for the remainder of the 2.5 hour broadcast. For a comprehensive explanation of the TV reception of the Apollo 11 broadcast, see "The Television Broadcasts" from the report "On Eagles Wings".
So really. Who would want to watch a movie about the Honeysuckle Creek station, with the main character saying after a few minutes of broadcasting the climactic moonwalk, "Ok guys, they've cut away from our low-quality signal and are using the much superior Parkes signal." Would this be preferable to what was shown in The Dish. I don't think so.