Hello!
I work for a telecommunications company and we take several television channels over C-band on 4.5 Meter Dishes. Starting on 5/24/2023 we started having quality issues on several different dishes at a similar time. Channels had severe tiling and pixelization and were for the most part unwatchable. We had several dishes with a BLUE 5 GHz filter installed and several which had a RED filter installed. We were not required to have BLUE filters installed until December of 2023. We had issues both with some using RED and some using BLUE. We had great signal levels and couldn't figure out what could cause multiple dish issues at the same time. Terrestrial in band interference was always in the back of our mind, but its very hard to mitigate. Long story short after peeking dishes (didn't help) and swapping filters around we finally found the issue. We had several of the BLUE filters that were not performing as they should. I have included some images of before and after on a spectrum analyzer. You can see where the haystacks look much different after we switch out filters. We believe a local cellular carrier started using the 3.7-4.0 GHz frequencies ahead of schedule and that is what caused the issues all at once. We have switched to a different manufacturer of filters and are planning to just replace all of our LNBs with 5G filtering integrated. Once we replaced the faulty filters we gained several DB signal strength as well. The filters we had the issues with were the ALGA 2100318-03-K-01-03 UPC: 210031803K. We replaced with Viking VSF-K-01-03 5G filters. You will also notice (see pictures) the ALGA cosmetically looks awful when exposed to the elements for a short amount of time.
Hopefully this helps someone out there. Sure gave us a few gray hairs over a holiday weekend!
I work for a telecommunications company and we take several television channels over C-band on 4.5 Meter Dishes. Starting on 5/24/2023 we started having quality issues on several different dishes at a similar time. Channels had severe tiling and pixelization and were for the most part unwatchable. We had several dishes with a BLUE 5 GHz filter installed and several which had a RED filter installed. We were not required to have BLUE filters installed until December of 2023. We had issues both with some using RED and some using BLUE. We had great signal levels and couldn't figure out what could cause multiple dish issues at the same time. Terrestrial in band interference was always in the back of our mind, but its very hard to mitigate. Long story short after peeking dishes (didn't help) and swapping filters around we finally found the issue. We had several of the BLUE filters that were not performing as they should. I have included some images of before and after on a spectrum analyzer. You can see where the haystacks look much different after we switch out filters. We believe a local cellular carrier started using the 3.7-4.0 GHz frequencies ahead of schedule and that is what caused the issues all at once. We have switched to a different manufacturer of filters and are planning to just replace all of our LNBs with 5G filtering integrated. Once we replaced the faulty filters we gained several DB signal strength as well. The filters we had the issues with were the ALGA 2100318-03-K-01-03 UPC: 210031803K. We replaced with Viking VSF-K-01-03 5G filters. You will also notice (see pictures) the ALGA cosmetically looks awful when exposed to the elements for a short amount of time.
Hopefully this helps someone out there. Sure gave us a few gray hairs over a holiday weekend!
