Solar conjunction season already?

[dlsnyder]

My son just called me and asked about a poor picture on E* ch 170 (Nickleodeon-E). I asked him to check another channel and he said it was OK. I told him to either deal with it until it goes away or watch something else. I was trying to find an explaination for it though. Could it be solar conjunction season starting in Cheyenne?

[Richard King]

Yep

[BobMurdoch]

How long does this last?

[Richard King]

about a week

[MAllen]

If you have never seen this phenomena, its really strange!! Several years ago I witnessed this personally!! I was at home watching a progream with a perfectly normal picture, then very slowly "snow" started appearing on the screen. First as only a few white random flecks and as time progressed more and more until "snow"only and no picture. After a minute or so the process reversed itself. I think the whole process lasted about 5-8 minutes. The next day at nearly the same time it happened again. That is when I figured it out and went out an saw that the sun had lined up with the dish and overpowered the signal.

[Richard King]

The snow you are seeing in the picture is created at the Dish downlink and is a characteristic of solar outages on analog channels when the satellite the channel is received from is between the receive site (Dish uplink center) and the sun. The signal that Dish receives is overpowered and gradually turns to sparkles and these sparkles are transmitted to all of their subs at the same time. The interesting thing about this is that you can "watch" the sun progress across the sky in Cheyenne Wo. from any Dish receive system. Different channels go out at different times as the sun moves "behind" different satellites through the day. At another time of the day (unless you are very close to the uplink) your personal dish may be effected as the sun moves behind the satellite from your line of site. This will make you lose all channels. The digital signal from Dish doesn't turn to sparkles, it may however block and freeze before going away completely.

[Mike123abc]

There should not be much solar outage on DBS satellite, they are 5x or so more powerful than C-Band, and should be out a much shorter time at all. But, you will see the sparkels because the C-Band that DBS downloads them from are being blocked.

You can follow it across the sky... check out www.lyngsat.com and start watching channels that are on the eastern satellites, and then when they go turn your channel to more western ones and watch for the sun to blot them out next.

[Richard King]

I haven't been at home during the outages so far, so I can't say for sure if the Dish receive signal is effected or not. If I recall correctly, I thought I remembered a picture freeze in a previous year's sun outage though.

[JohnH]

When it is a receive problem at the uplink, DirecTV usually puts up an info screen for the short period of the outage.

The solar conjunction season lasts about 2 weeks as it moves from north to south in early March and from south to north in late October. The seasonal affects on the uplinks are shorter as the uplinks are in a specific location. The signal reduction at home dishes is short for a specific location as well, but it takes a couple of weeks for the effects to move from northern states to southern states.

I have seen the effects on C band for a few days now.

[firephoto]

I noticed this on the CNN channels the other day but didn't notice it on any others that I checked. It caught my attention because it started out as static sound then I noticed the sparkles in the picture. It was just a little fuzzy with a lot of noise (sound).

[firephoto]

Just lost VH1 Classic (ch. 163) for about 5 minutes or so. It was a digital fade I guess. Major pixelation followed by black screen, then it came back the same way. VH1 was fine, CMT, and CNN too. (didn't look at anything else.) Happened 1:00 pm PST.

[Richard King]

CNN is on Galaxy V in analog. You witnessed it disappearing from the receive dish in Wyoming. Any other channels on this bird would have also been gone. Take a look here: http://www.lyngsat.com/g5.shtml to see others on this bird and when CNN goes away tomorrow check out these channels also.