Recent content by Inclined Orbit

All of the HD transponders should have the exact same modulation characteristics such as modulation type, symbol rate, data rate, FEC, etc. The thing that is specific to each DirecTV HD transponder is the scrambling code. That is an obscure feature in the DVBS2 protocol and I think DirecTV is...

Its completely sufficient and met all pointing specs called out by DirecTVs chief technology officer for the original KaKu dish and the Slimline. We (several brilliant PhDs and I) did a lot of research and I did all the field testing for proposed alignment ideas and when the smoke cleared it was...

I believe D11 has XIPS propulsion and that requires very little propellent along with a lot of electrical power compared to traditional bipropellent thrusters. Station keeping fuel is the main thing driving satellite lifespan and XIPS really extents the lifespan. Unless it fails.

SWM is a problem for simple meters but if I remember right, when the SWM boots up its in a test mode that might provide the needed transponders which used to include the specific 101 for alignment plus 110 and 119 which are not needed these days. I've been retired for 10yrs and have forgotten...

Its best if the mast is plumb to initially find the satellite faster from pointing data but in reality it can be way off as going through the alignment with "dither" adjustment will get you right on target to potentially +/- .1deg. That's 1/10 of one degree. The reason for this accuracy is to...

If its the entire satellite I would suspect a station keeping maneuver went wrong pointing the antennas away from earth. There is a lot of redundancy in the spacecraft like power busses, maybe a few spare transponders, etc. A complete failure is unlikely but has happened in the past.

I find this amusing because when ATT took over DirecTV they not only got rid of the old but knowledgeable and effective upper management, they laid off a lot of the people that made the place run smooth and kept problems under control. I was hoping when ATT took a back seat in the day to day...

I believe you will be responsible for paying state and federal sales tax on the retail value of the prize. I suspect it will be charged yearly. Let's see here, divide $198,000 by 30yrs is $6,600 per year and at my tax rate that would be about $2,500 per year in tax. Nothing is free.

Luxo is the industry standard for desk mounted lighted magnifying glass stuff, just search eBay for "luxo magnifying" and there will be lots of new and surplus lights. When I worked in the 2-way radio industry then aerospace there was a Luxo on every work bench.

I have ATT fiber and they brought the fiber in parallel with my old copper wires from the pole to the side of the garage, through the garage and installed equipment in my basement near the original TELCO demark point. There is a box that converts fiber to Ethernet, a battery backup power supply...

Mesh screens around dishes can be very difficult to build right and in many cases will not address the problem. The commercial one's I've seen around Intelsat sites for their critical monitoring dishes were made of fine copper mesh and I had one 11m C-band dish project that required a huge...

Last time I checked they were still in use at two uplink centers and its been at least 10yrs since they were installed. We installed a redundant set of Alaska/Hawaii dishes and a pair of 1.2m for DTVLA reception (6 dishes total at each site) to a custom amplifier distribution system I designed...

Yes they work well. We installed them at a couple of DirecTV uplink centers in CA to give more headroom for feeding hundreds (and hundreds!) of receivers for confidence monitoring.

A friend has a 14ft Prodelin fiberglass dish with mount, actuator, Seavy feed and LNB. The dish is located in Glendale, CA and is on a pole up against a house. There is easy access from the roof to dismantle. This dish was in commercial service at his house receiving various programs then...

If you don't have any meter, including the on screen receiver signal strengths, then how would anyone point a dish at all? You cant go for best picture quality.