This was several days ago, but I'm still bouncing this through my head trying to think of a cause.
I think it was saturday afternoon, and I was watching the PBS-HD feed on AMC-21 12140. I actually had it going on two different receivers, my Twinhan, which was slaved off my Diamond-9000, which was controlling the switch/lnbf on my fixed Primestar dish.
The signal was about 32/30 on the Twinhan, which is generally equivalent to about 75/75 on my other receivers. The Twinhan will usually lock well down to about 15-18 on the quality.
Well, some time between 4:30-5:00 PM, EDT, the signal slowly began to go south on this transponder, on both receivers, and eventually I lost lock. I switched to another PBS program on the new NET channels on G28, but I kept watching the signal on the Twinhan. After losing lock for 5 minutes or so, the lock came back, so I turned on the TSREADER signal plot function, and watched as the signal rose from around 18, all the way up to above 30... but then it started slowly falling again, and fell all the way down again. I lost lock, but the plot still kept going all the way down to about 13 or so.... then slowly increased, all the way up to around 32/30 where it started. It then held steady, and has been at it's normal level ever since, every time I've checked.
The thing behaved somewhat similar to a solar outage, but it's obviously about 2 months too early for that, however my view of AMC21 is over top of the metal roofs on both my house and garage, so I thought that there might be some strange reflection of solar energy off one of the metal roofs. However I waited uptil Sunday afternnoon, and watched, and there was no repeat of the phenomenon.
When something similar happened, a couple years ago, someone suggested that an AWACs might have been active in the area, but keep a milair scanner running all the time, and never heard any AWACs.
Too late to check, I thought that perhaps it was a problem at the uplink. I can't remember the exact location of the PBS uplink facility, but I think it is in the northern Virginia/ southern Maryland area, south or southeast of DC, but I'm not sure. I checked the historical weather at Andrews AFB, and it was just mostly cloudy at the time of the outage, however about 2 hours later, there was a period of heavy rain, so it's possible that there were some isolated thunderstorms going through that area, that attenuated the uplink. However, if this were the case, it seems likely that someone else would have noticed the signal going out.
So the question is (after the overly long buildup) is..... was anyone watching PBS 12140 Saturday afternoon (I think it was during the History Detectives show), and noticed any loss of signal on that transponder? Just curious. Weather at the uplink seems to be the only likely cause I can think of.
I think it was saturday afternoon, and I was watching the PBS-HD feed on AMC-21 12140. I actually had it going on two different receivers, my Twinhan, which was slaved off my Diamond-9000, which was controlling the switch/lnbf on my fixed Primestar dish.
The signal was about 32/30 on the Twinhan, which is generally equivalent to about 75/75 on my other receivers. The Twinhan will usually lock well down to about 15-18 on the quality.
Well, some time between 4:30-5:00 PM, EDT, the signal slowly began to go south on this transponder, on both receivers, and eventually I lost lock. I switched to another PBS program on the new NET channels on G28, but I kept watching the signal on the Twinhan. After losing lock for 5 minutes or so, the lock came back, so I turned on the TSREADER signal plot function, and watched as the signal rose from around 18, all the way up to above 30... but then it started slowly falling again, and fell all the way down again. I lost lock, but the plot still kept going all the way down to about 13 or so.... then slowly increased, all the way up to around 32/30 where it started. It then held steady, and has been at it's normal level ever since, every time I've checked.
The thing behaved somewhat similar to a solar outage, but it's obviously about 2 months too early for that, however my view of AMC21 is over top of the metal roofs on both my house and garage, so I thought that there might be some strange reflection of solar energy off one of the metal roofs. However I waited uptil Sunday afternnoon, and watched, and there was no repeat of the phenomenon.
When something similar happened, a couple years ago, someone suggested that an AWACs might have been active in the area, but keep a milair scanner running all the time, and never heard any AWACs.
Too late to check, I thought that perhaps it was a problem at the uplink. I can't remember the exact location of the PBS uplink facility, but I think it is in the northern Virginia/ southern Maryland area, south or southeast of DC, but I'm not sure. I checked the historical weather at Andrews AFB, and it was just mostly cloudy at the time of the outage, however about 2 hours later, there was a period of heavy rain, so it's possible that there were some isolated thunderstorms going through that area, that attenuated the uplink. However, if this were the case, it seems likely that someone else would have noticed the signal going out.
So the question is (after the overly long buildup) is..... was anyone watching PBS 12140 Saturday afternoon (I think it was during the History Detectives show), and noticed any loss of signal on that transponder? Just curious. Weather at the uplink seems to be the only likely cause I can think of.
