Atlas 5 fitted with a Rainbow

[rtt2]

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av003/030707payloadmate.html

Atlas 5 fitted with a Rainbow
BY JUSTIN RAY
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: July 7, 2003 at 3:45 p.m. EDT

Fueled and ready to fly, the Rainbow 1 direct-to-home TV broadcasting satellite was delivered to Lockheed Martin's Atlas 5 assembly building and mounted atop its rocket launcher today for next week's liftoff from Cape Canaveral.

[Jacob S]

The article says 18 inch dishes are going to be used. I thought it was going to be 13 inches? Also it says 80-90% of the U.S. is going to be able to receive this service. How can that be when they are using the 61.5 orbital slot? Can some in the central and midwest receive 61.5 as well? If so how well and what is the look angle?

I am glad that things are going well with getting things going so far. Someone had mentioned that they still have no uplink center though and have not made the receivers/systems either.

[Mike123abc]

It is the northwest, Alaska and Hawaii that will have problems/not be able to see it at all. You can go to www.lyngsat.com and look at the sat tracker. You can look at E3 at 61.5 and see the look angle. Below 15 degrees gets hard to see with ground clutter, below 10 is very hard. The northwest is pretty much around 15, so if there are trees around it will be hard to see, AK and HI are below the horizon.

[rtt2]

Check out this link:
http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi?native_or_pdf=pdf&id_document=6513291850

This is an old page of anti-trust issues with D* & E* and possibly remedy actions but on page 6 of this link shows where nationwide service will be available for Rainbow DBS (or whatever it is eventually called). It looks like this service will be primarily the east coast.

Hopefully this will cause more competition to force Charlie to put up Connecticut locals. :righton:

[Richard King]

I may have to drive up to the Cape for that one. I watched tonight's launch from here and couldn't get decent pix, so a trip to the Cape seems in order for next week.

[Mike123abc]

R/L DBS has not indicated whether or not they will offer LIL. They have pretty much said in the past that if they do not get all of 61.5 to themselves (during the merger talks) that they would not have enough transponders to do LIL.

Now rumors have come around of them sharing LIL/HDTV/Internationals with Dish. These have been rumors and until we see an official announcement I would not count on many locals with R/L DBS because they only have 11 transponders. The satellite was designed to use all of 61.5 so that they could put LIL on 7 transponders or so, and use the other 25 for national programming.

[Jacob S]

I think it would be great if they could share space with each other because it would help them both out.