Thanks to the Dish Network Uplink Center

Scott Greczkowski

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Cutting Edge
Sep 7, 2003
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Newington, CT
I am on the bus back from the Dish Network Uplink Center in Cheyenne, WY. And what a great tour I had of this amazing facility.

Thanks go to Robert my guide who took me and my group through the uplink.

Unfortunately pictures inside the building are not allowed but you can take all the photos you want outside the building.

I also took some HD video, which you can see below. This is one amazing place.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_scYwvROe0"]YouTube - Dish Network Uplink Footage[/ame]

I was there in time for todays uplink, and when it happened I was surrounded by Uplink employees and engineers. Within moments of the uplink happening I got Digiblur's uplink report and the Dish folks enjoyed passing my phone around checking out the uplink activity. They were amazed at how quickly the report was sent out.

This year on the uplink I was able to see things that we were not shown the last time I was here, including down the stairs where the signals come in and are encoded. Thats an amazing room and the wiring job down there is a 1st class job. The Dish Network uplink center has enough cables in it to circle around the earth 6 times!

While in the room where the wall of monitors was they actually had an issue, one of the audio channels went down. We got to see them spring to work and fix the issue in seconds.

We even got to go into the spacecraft operations center, where we were given a nice tour. The head of the department gave a very good walkthrough of the operations. He also knew who I was and picked on me because of something I posted a few weeks ago where I said that the uplink centers clocks are set to eastern time. While this is true for most of the facility things like spacecraft operations operate on Zulu time.

Most at the uplink knew who I was and all said they use SatelliteGuys. (I find that very cool, these guys LOVE your feedback and a few admitted that there are times there are issues and they learn about them on SatelliteGuys first. Also passing through the uplink center I saw our site on a number of monitors. This was also VERY cool!

I got to ask a lot of questions and all the folks there were happy to answer my questions. In fact I would say while I was there they made me feel like I was home and part of the family. That means a lot to me and it was a very enjoyable time!

Below are most of the pictures I took outside. The photos were shot with an Apple iPhone and came out well for a camera phone. :)

Thanks again to everyone at the uplink center for the warm welcome and the excellent tour!
 

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Great report, Scott. However, it is a little disconcerting to hear the techs there have to reply on this site to discover issues. Maybe they should spend less time web surfing and more time doing their jobs. :D
 
Great report, Scott. However, it is a little disconcerting to hear the techs there have to reply on this site to discover issues. Maybe they should spend less time web surfing and more time doing their jobs. :D

Actually I think it's kinda cool that they are paying attention to this site. What a great focus group for a tech driven product!
 
Yeah shows why Dish is better than other TV Providers out there. They take the time to look and see what their customers are saying online. That tells me that they do listen sometimes to what their customers are wanting. Cool that they had SatelliteGuys on the toob I always give a plug to SatelliteGuys everytime I have to talk to Dish.
 
Great report, Scott. However, it is a little disconcerting to hear the techs there have to reply on this site to discover issues. Maybe they should spend less time web surfing and more time doing their jobs. :D
While they have remote monitoring setup around the country there are areas where the monitoring that does not cover the entire area (especially in spot beam areas) and when something happens normally SatelliteGuys members are the first to report the issues.

We are true instant feedback for the uplink folks. I am proud of this. :)
 
So, what did they actually do, that resulted in us seeing the "uplink report" - a few mouse clicks and key presses on a machine with an updated copy of the tables?
 
So, what did they actually do, that resulted in us seeing the "uplink report" - a few mouse clicks and key presses on a machine with an updated copy of the tables?
Yup thats about it. The true heart of the uplink is getting the channels ready. Lots of wiring, routing, processing etc to make it all happen.
 
The first post has been updated with HD video from the Uplink Center I shot today, and in addition I have uploaded a lot more pictures from the trip.

Again a big thank you to all the folks at the Uplink Center!