Thanks to the Dish Network Uplink Center

**Scott Greczkowski** · 05-06-2009 03:55 PM

I am on the bus back from the Dish Network Uplink Center in Cheyenne, WY. And what a great tour I had of this amazing facility.

Thanks go to Robert my guide who took me and my group through the uplink.

Unfortunately pictures inside the building are not allowed but you can take all the photos you want outside the building.

I also took some HD video, which you can see below. This is one amazing place.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_scYwvROe0"]YouTube - Dish Network Uplink Footage[/ame]

I was there in time for todays uplink, and when it happened I was surrounded by Uplink employees and engineers. Within moments of the uplink happening I got Digiblur's uplink report and the Dish folks enjoyed passing my phone around checking out the uplink activity. They were amazed at how quickly the report was sent out.

This year on the uplink I was able to see things that we were not shown the last time I was here, including down the stairs where the signals come in and are encoded. Thats an amazing room and the wiring job down there is a 1st class job. The Dish Network uplink center has enough cables in it to circle around the earth 6 times!

While in the room where the wall of monitors was they actually had an issue, one of the audio channels went down. We got to see them spring to work and fix the issue in seconds.

We even got to go into the spacecraft operations center, where we were given a nice tour. The head of the department gave a very good walkthrough of the operations. He also knew who I was and picked on me because of something I posted a few weeks ago where I said that the uplink centers clocks are set to eastern time. While this is true for most of the facility things like spacecraft operations operate on Zulu time.

Most at the uplink knew who I was and all said they use SatelliteGuys. (I find that very cool, these guys LOVE your feedback and a few admitted that there are times there are issues and they learn about them on SatelliteGuys first. Also passing through the uplink center I saw our site on a number of monitors. This was also VERY cool!

I got to ask a lot of questions and all the folks there were happy to answer my questions. In fact I would say while I was there they made me feel like I was home and part of the family. That means a lot to me and it was a very enjoyable time!

Below are most of the pictures I took outside. The photos were shot with an Apple iPhone and came out well for a camera phone.

Thanks again to everyone at the uplink center for the warm welcome and the excellent tour!