Site Survey & Electric Lines

[Captain Midnight]

Planning to buy a house, and I don't have the option to really make the BUD a priority, but my wife will allow it in our side yard. The only issue is that there are high voltage lines running N to S in the side yard. Anyone else had issues with lines like these? I am curious on how it would affect my C band...

 

[comfortably_numb]

my wife will allow it

Yet another reason not to have a wife...

 

[Captain Midnight]

Well I am thinking I am going to try to see if I can get it in a spot where the power lines are covering 107-111w.

 

[Comptech]

You should not have any problems unless they Are High tension lines. even then anything they radiate will be at a much lower frequency. Might cause a slight signal loss but not much if they are hundreds of feet away. My dish is directly below a LED street light and LED's give of tons of RF and I have no problem.

 

[Captain Midnight]

You should not have any problems unless they Are High tension lines. even then anything they radiate will be at a much lower frequency. Might cause a slight signal loss but not much if they are hundreds of feet away. My dish is directly below a LED street light and LED's give of tons of RF and I have no problem.

Here is a good look at the lines. These are much closer than 100ft. Wish they were buried.

 

[ancient]

I have no actual experience with these but from what I know of electronics it would take a lot more than those wire to cause any significant signal loss. Since the wires are relatively thin, the only loss you would have is from where the wires shadow the dish in relation to the satellite, and that would be negligible. The pole would actually cause more loss, so you should try to not have that between you and the satellites if possible, but if your dish is large enough even that shouldn't be an issue. Electrical lines should not be radiating in C-band or Ku-band frequencies (it would likely be an FCC violation if they did) so really just the shadowing of the dish by the wires and/or the pole would probably be your only concern, and unless you have a very undersized dish I would not think they'd be a real problem.

 

[one_db_compression]

I have no actual experience with these but from what I know of electronics it would take a lot more than those wire to cause any significant signal loss. Since the wires are relatively thin, the only loss you would have is from where the wires shadow the dish in relation to the satellite, and that would be negligible. The pole would actually cause more loss, so you should try to not have that between you and the satellites if possible, but if your dish is large enough even that shouldn't be an issue. Electrical lines should not be radiating in C-band or Ku-band frequencies (it would likely be an FCC violation if they did) so really just the shadowing of the dish by the wires and/or the pole would probably be your only concern, and unless you have a very undersized dish I would not think they'd be a real problem.

Commenting on a thread that is 9 months old...

It is unlikely that a single creosote-soaked utility pole is going to cause any signal issues unless the pole is immediately adjacent and is dead-center on the look angle. A handful of conductors is also unlikely to cause appreciable diffraction for RX situations. If you were TX'ing, you could encounter some strangeness...see below, as there are some other interesting scenarios that can cause grief though that are worth mentioning.

If you look at a high voltage line that uses steel lattice towers and the right-of-way is basically straight, from certain acute angles it can look like a solid metal band on the horizon. I had a microwave path fail when a section of line about 20 miles in length with towers pushing 200 feet was constructed. The angle of incidence of the microwave shot versus the utility towers going into infinity at the horizon created the effect of shooting into a metal wall.

I have also seen intermittent microwave path issues with wind farms. With the site's specific structural layout and given the wind direction on any random day, the nacelles will rotate into the wind and suddenly a lot of blades are now spinning with an orientation that exhibit the same effect as above. It took a field tech a week of sitting in a truck to correlate the path fade with the blade orientations.

This is very unlikely to affect satellite comms unless you are trying to pick up a bird that is located notionally just above the horizon at your particular location. Terrestrial microwave has a lot of looks where the elevation is +/- a fraction of a degree, so functionally flat on the horizon.

So if you had a large bundle of conductors (i.e. - phase conductors with multiple levels on the pole), it is not impossible that a TX'ing satellite aperture might "see" a band of metal. Ideally situations like this would have been identified upfront in a site survey prior to engineering and construction.

Your mileage may vary.

 

[radio]

Agreed. Should not be an issue.

 

[Hyper Casey]

Totally agree. Here is a pic of my BUD when we installed it. Just look how close those power lines are. In reality they are like 15 -18 feet away from the BUD. Directly over that fence line. No issues whatsoever, and believe me i was quite worried about it at the time.

 

[Captain Midnight]

I got my BUD installed and am running trouble free!