Solar outage day!

fat-tony

Today (1st March) is the peak day for solar outages when the sun is aligned with the Clarke belt. I've been monitoring the effects on my reception from various satellites for the past couple of days. Those of you with motorised systems or dishes fixed on marginal reception satellites might be interested to check if you're affected.

I have a 1.1m dish which is motorised. I'm using an Mvision 200HD combo receiver and have used Gorbtrack for the prediction of the outage times.

So far this morning I have observed the loss of weak transponders on 53E, 39E, 36E. Each time the blackout lasted approximately 4/5 minutes.

On BADR4 at 26E I lost reception on every transponder for 5 minutes. The weaker ones were gone for about 6 minutes.

Even on Astra 2 the quality level on the weakest transponder I could find (Luxe TV - standard def) went from 82% down to 50%. I didn't see any blocky artefacts or other picture or sound disturbance but my receiver seems to have a threshold at around 50% where I lose lock on the transponder, so it's difficult to tell the actual error rate.

If you're interested in checking reception for yourselves (Thor on 1W might be interesting!) here are the predicted times of outages today. Times are for east coast. On the west coast subtract 1 minute. If people are interested I can post tomorrow's times.

16E - 11.00.01
13E - 11.12.33
10E - 11.26.02
1W - 12.13.39
5W - 12.32.15
15W - 13.15.55
27W - 14.10.35
30W - 14.21.53
43W - 15.17.54
58W - 16.21.48
61W - 16.34.51

Manc-Red

Mad stuff!

16e went on me at the estimated time above

joe250

1west went off at 12:10 here.

fat-tony

I was monitoring DAD4-FIBER-TX (NBC feed) on 15W. I lost the signal from 13:11 - 13:20, which was 4 mins either side of the predicted 13:15:55 outage time. The SQ went from 74% at 13:05 to around 50% at 13:10 after which I lost the lock on the transponder. It took about 5 mins after I regained the lock to climb back to 75%. The effects last almost 20 mins in total on my 1.1m dish - would be longer on a smaller dish.

gtg60

Hmm, interesting, so why does this happen exactly?

fat-tony

gtg60 wrote: »

Hmm, interesting, so why does this happen exactly?

The Sun is a source of microwaves. As it is behind any particular satellite it tends to swamp the LNB with with its own radiation as well as that from the satellite. If the transponder signal is not particularly high it will tend to get "drowned out". It doesn't really affect the signal that much from powerful sats like Astra or Hotbird, but if you're on the fringe of reception it knocks out the signal whle the Sun passes the satellite.
This happens twice a year (March and October in these latitudes) as the Sun is passing near the equator. Or more precisely, as the Sun appears to pass near the equatorial plane as we orbit, due to the 23 degree tilt of the Earth's axis.

snaps

Many years ago when satellite tv was growing i remember people posting that sometimes this can damage the lnb? Any truth or risk of this fat tony?

watty

If the dish was reflective, even in Infrared (hence very matt black or tar is as bad a mirror), then the visible light/Infra red can cook the LNB. Like setting fire to paper with a magnifying lens. This is why dishes are dull "egg shell" finish. It's one case where a mesh has a 40% advantage. Less heat/light reflected.

fat-tony

snaps wrote: »

Many years ago when satellite tv was growing i remember people posting that sometimes this can damage the lnb? Any truth or risk of this fat tony?

I thought of this all right, but there seemed to be no reflection of light onto the LNB at all (dish is dull grey), but I had no way of knowing if heat energy (far infrared) was being focussed on the LNB. Big dishes at low latitudes would seem to be candidates for this, but at 53 North in March I was prepared to take a chance:D. As watty says, different surface treatments would inhibit reflection of light and heat. Maybe an experiment for October when it happens again?;)