Reading through this thread as well as others that speak to weather related outages there does not seem to be any specific link to the part of the country a writer is located in and outages. Save having snow piled on the dish I'm not sure I have a good understanding of how some folks that live in areas that experience heavy snow fall never loos signal (again save for snow being piled up on the dish) and others do.
One of the frustrating aspects of being a dish customer is that when ever I we have a heavy snow or rain we loose some or all of our signal. Usually the first to go is the 61.5 which is livable as we just watch the non HD channels until it passes. But when we loose everything it can be very frustrating especially if we come home to find that the program we dvr'd is blank!
So how is it that there are those that have never or rarely experienced a weather related outage and then there are those that loose signal when ever the snow fly's.
Ross
Ross,
It is also the atmospheric conditions that will occasionally dump the signal. Using the easiest example.........a dish pointed at forty five degrees elevation is "looking" up one foot for every foot away from the dish. So at one mile out the dish is "looking through the atmosphere one mile up. So how high is the storm from your house? Five miles out and 25,000 feet up would allow the sun to shine on you but snow and rain etc are out and up there blocking your signal...on it's way in from 23,000 miles out...where the satellite is in orbit, in the Clarke Belt.
Signals from the KA band satellites, at 99 & 103 west longitude positions send the HD programming and tend to be blocked easier by weather.
Next class will discuss sun spots and their effects on communications systems.
This stuff applies to DISH & Cable.
Joe