Spot Beams with Larger Dishes

[casper809]

Ok I have a vacation home in northern california where I lose my non full-conus LA stations (KCOP, KCAL etc.) My signal meter shows transponder 3 (which from what I have read is the spot beam transponder for So Cal) shows a signal strength of 48. My question is if I use a 30" or 36" dish would I be able to possibly pick up those stations on the So. Cal Spot?

[Mike123abc]

It is hard to say because the Washington/Oregon spot is also near there. If you are too far away from the LA spot you will get interference from the other spot. In the upper part of the state you could get the WA/OR spot not the LA spot, or they could cancel each other out.

[rangers]

Originally posted by casper809
Ok I have a vacation home in northern california where I lose my non full-conus LA stations (KCOP, KCAL etc.) My signal meter shows transponder 3 (which from what I have read is the spot beam transponder for So Cal) shows a signal strength of 48. My question is if I use a 30" or 36" dish would I be able to possibly pick up those stations on the So. Cal Spot?

Are you using DirecTV or Dish Network? I have a 48" offset dish trying to lock Dish Network's southern cal spot beam (on 119W) from northern cal. No go.

[Rifleman]

I'm approximately 250 mi. outside of the Kansas City spot, and have a .75 m Channel Master dish. The signal is not strong enough to be useable. (signal under 40-50 on an E* 3000)

[JohnH]

casper809 try 30" and see what happens. It will give you better rainfade margain at the least.

[BoilerT]

does anyone have footprint maps for the DirecTV spot beams?

[Mike123abc]

Check out:

http://wvjw.info/dbs-beam/

There are some nice maps of all spot beam satellites.

[J. Allen Head]

Thanks Mike, I've been looking for these maps

[viers]

Just cause your getting a certain transponder doesnt' mean that transponder is caring that channel in that specific area. Reason they use spot beams is due to the fact they can reuse the same sat. space. I sen people in boston want seatle locals, signal strength is great for that spotbeam, They can even authorize the reciever for the channel, but guess, channel isn't broadcasted to that specific area.

[DoyleS]

Casper809 how far north are you? The Spot beam pattern for LA looks to go up to about Paso Robles and not much farther. With a spot beam, the gain of the antenna on the bird falls off pretty rapidly outside of its beam. You just cannot compensate for that when you get much past its fringe area. It would be interesting to note where Ranger is also. SFO Bay Area locals are easily receivable in the Paso Robles area but I don't know how much farther south one could go.

..Doyle

[Jacob S]

How many spot beams can Dish pick up on one of their large satellites? Do they do this?

[DoyleS]

It looks like they have 4 spots on each of the spot TP frequencies. eg: Northeast, Southeast, Southern Cal, Northwest. Or some combination that is similiar. They do not tend to put Northern Cal and Southern Cal on the same TP with adjacent spots. Hope that makes sense. You can see that by looking at the lyngsat charts showing the TP frequencies and spot areas.

..Doyle

[Mike123abc]

There a lots of limits on the number of spots a sattellite can have:

1. Power requirements, this limits the number of transponders

2. The size of the spacecraft. Each spot takes a 2.5-3 meter solid dish (cannot be mesh so does not fold up).

3. Uplink frequencies. DBS has a matching uplink frequency for each transponder allocated to it by the FCC, they get around this by using multiple uplink sites... E* uses 2, so on 119 they have 21 frequencies, they can uplink 42 transponders worth so they 25 spots on 5 frequencies and 16 CONUS frequencies, so they use 41 of their 42 uplink tranciever capacity. They could of course spend a few million and build another uplink center somewhere else for another sattellite if they decided to do more at 119.

4. A spot is about 500miles minimum size. And they need to be about 500 miles apart from eachother to reuse the same transponder frequencies. This limits them to about 5 spots around the CONUS using the same frequencies. They can stretch some to 7-8 but the average would be closer to 5.

So for the ones E* is using they have have about 15 spots with 25 frequencies in them and use 16 CONUS transponders.