[time-nuts] Sun Outage

[Andy]

Bob Stewart <bob at evoria.net> wrote:

...  Also, the cartoons I was recording for my granddaughter were
> unaffected, but the station I was watching had the outage.  That doesn't
> all fit together unless it was the uplink that had the problem.


I don't think the uplink itself can have this problem.

But DirecTV uses multiple transponders per satellite, and in some cases
more than one satellite, so all the channels are not affected equally.

When I had DirecTV, we had two dishes.  The installer boggled up the first
install so they came back and put up another one several feet away, mounted
on a more stable surface (not roof shingles).  The first dish was one that
could be used for multiple satellites.  It had three 'focal' points with
three little radomes that either had, or could have, LNAs in them.  Each
points to a different spot in the sky.  The second dish had only one.
Regardless, we received only one satellite.

I don't recall ever being affected by a solar outage, but rain and ice were
real killers!  Yeah they say rain shouldn't cause an outage, but it does
when the rain density is high enough.  I could use that to predict when we
were about to be hit by a downpour.  There was about a 3 minute lag between
losing all the channels, and the downpour starting.

It occurred to me that one could use satellite signals as a meteorological
instrument to measure the water density in the atmosphere above you.  I
wonder if the NWS does that.

Andy