SOLAR ACTIVITY?

[AcWxRadar]

Is anyone here witnessing a huge loss in all channels from all satellites within the past day or two?

I couldn't get the RTNs to come in any longer yesterday, so today I drove the dish to 123W and almost everything was dead and gone. Within a few minutes, they were all back up again. I checked channels on a couple of other sats during the down-time and the signal level and quality were really low on many other sats, too!

I called up my brother to ask him if he was experiencing this, but he was on the road, driving, so couldn't talk on his cell phone too long. A few moments later, all the channels started popping back in and the signal and quality levels began rising up to their original levels.

Anyone else experience something unusual like this today?

RADAR

 

[ACRadio]

Nope...nothing here...

 

[AcWxRadar]

Nope...nothing here...

All my channels are now back in service. I did not do anything to the dish to compensate for this, they just went away and then 10-20 minutes later, they returned. But, this was not on just one sat, it was many sats.

RADAR

 

[SatelliteAV]

No specific explanation if you are not having weather related issues. We are currently at the bottom of the solar activity cycle and the sites show no recent flares. Solar flares usually would not have high enough signal energy to wipe out the signals on many satellites located in varying orbital slots. Solar outages affect satellite signals for several week each Spring and Summer when the sun tracks behind or near the desired satellite.

Several years ago my mother experienced signal outages at specific times of the day. After ruling out a defective LNB, finally tracked it down to a nearby faulty power transformer that was emitting RF noise.

The power company swapped out the transformer and the problem went away.

 

[AcWxRadar]

No specific explanation if you are not having weather related issues. We are currently at the bottom of the solar activity cycle and the sites show no recent flares. Solar flares usually would not have high enough signal energy to wipe out the signals on many satellites located in varying orbital slots. Solar outages affect satellite signals for several week each Spring and Summer when the sun tracks behind or near the desired satellite.

Several years ago my mother experienced signal outages at specific times of the day. After ruling out a defective LNB, finally tracked it down to a nearby faulty power transformer that was emitting RF noise.

The power company swapped out the transformer and the problem went away.

SatelliteAV,

Thanks for the information, I did not hear of any "solar" activity to be worried about, but I cannot explain it otherwise. The sky here was crystal clear and clean as a whistle. But, with the other strange problems I and now my brother (who didn't believe me until he witnessed it on his own system) have experienced in the past two day with 83.0W, I got a bit curious.

It was a very strange anomaly today for me, something I had never witnessed before. Almost all the sats went extremely low on signal and quality and many dropped off completely.

I went out and looked at the dish and there were no wild turkeys roosting on it, so I cannot explain it.

The problem developed and then slowly went away, like the response you might get with solar outages for satellites. While I was trying to discuss the anomaly with my brother, I could watch the signal slowly, but steadily, improve. It was too odd!

RADAR

 

[Mr Tony]

gremlins

 

[Larobpra]

I was watching 123°W at lunchtime. The picture started pixelating and then was gone. The 2 TPs with the Equity stations were both dead. I thought maybe they had the plug pulled on them. All the other TPs were fine. Everything is back on 123° now.

 

[Mr Tony]

Equity issues usually are related to Little Rock weather

 

[hd fan]

yeah iceberg but the funny thing is that today between 6 and 8 pm I had a friend who lives in etobicoke in front of the lake ontario who had the same issue with the equity TP's (65-68 Q on Coolsat 6000, 65 minimum to lock, 91 normal) but oddly enough at the same time I was at another friend's house and they had normal signal on their motorized same 90 cm dish with a CW 600P with 48Q (minimum should be 25).

I looked at the weather.com web and little rock, AK had a T-Storm with heavy rain as per the doppler radar and that would explain the pixelation but why it did not affect the motorized dish install?

They have different paths eventhough they do not live too apart so maybe there was another heavy rain on another closeby US city along one path and not the other. Who knows?. Really frustrating this low birds , specially this equity TP's.

 

[Mr Tony]

yeah iceberg but the funny thing is that today between 6 and 8 pm I had a friend who lives in etobicoke in front of the lake ontario

I know where Etobicoke is...one of the addresses that we use in my job (tracking auto insurance) is Etobicoke

 

[turbosat]

mystery

Radar aren't you and your brother both using the same type receiver? Seems I remember that..from other posts. Unless you're both being hit with some kind of microwave transmission I would begin to suspect the receivers.