[time-nuts] Sun Outage

[Bob Camp]

Hi

Bringing this back to GPS…

The TV stuff is at about 8X the frequency of GPS. That makes a difference in terms of things like rain. That said, yes, there probably is some giant rainstorm that would impact GPS accuracy. Much more likely in a “I can only see a small patch of sky” situation. 

Bob

On Oct 10, 2014, at 1:16 AM, Andy <AI.egrps+tn at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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