[TNGTony]

Well folks, even the big boys have a rain fade. This is not news, but it's the most recent occurrence of rain fade affecting a live program from the source.

Tonight Showtime Championship Boxing was scheduled to start live at 10pm. Well at 10 PM I turned to Showtime to watch one of the two reasons I subscribe to this POS premium service (Jeremiah is the other). I was met with promo after promo after promo for movies, programs and more crap. At about 10:10 a slate came up "The programming scheduled will not be shown at this time" then a standard "The following movie has been rated R" then a PROMO for Street Smart (a Showtime excuse for original programming).

Then about another few promos and FINALLY Showtime Championship Boxing begins! It started with lots and lots of technical problems (wrong audio cues and sound issues). And they kept going live as if nothing had happened.

At the beginning of the first undercard fight (Amus versus Andy...lousy fighters) finally the announcer gave the reason for the near 20 minute late start: Severe weather had blocked the signal from the facility in Mississippi to the Showtime "studios" in NYC. Rain Fade! It can happen with 10' dishes folks!

See ya
Tony

 

[Mike]

Rain fade happens all of the time on the big dishes. Showtime probably feeds their backhauls via digital on Ku now (used to be BMAC on analog). Ku-band can get hit hard with rain fade. I've seen it several times. NBC is on Ku and gets hit occasionally. If the storm is big enough then it will effect signals even on a bigger than DBS dish.

 

[MarkA]

We must get a really strong DBS signal here or something - I've never had rain fade. On DBS, I have had it on cable.

 

[Mark Holtz]

Different Ku frequencies.

 

[Guest]

NBC affiliates (usually) have 6.1 meter dishes. And they use the FSS Ku band (11.7 GHz to 12.2 GHz). DBS uses the BSS Ku band (12.2 GHZ to 12.7 GHz)

While there possibly a bit of difference in how rain affects the FSS portion of Ku (compared to DBS), I suspect the difference is very small, bordering on insignificant. The big difference is transponder power levels are lower on FSS. The maximum I've heard of is 50 watts.

When I worked at an NBC affiliate, the rain fades could sometimes last as much as a half hour, but that was the exception. When it did happen, we cut over to the C-band (east coast) feed. I doubt if NBC has a C-band west coast feed.

 

[Mike]

NBC last October went MPEG digital on c and ku band. NBC feeds all 4 time zones now on both the c and ku sides on one transponder. I understand the c-band feed was and is kept today for Hawaii and Alaska as they can't/couldn't "see" the ku feeds when NBC went to ku band in I think 1986. Last rain fade for NBC happened last year in a golf tournament. Golf location was getting pummeled with rain and it affected the analog backhaul feed. NBC network stuck with it as long as possible. I think they did a studio show for about 15 minutes, but I don't remember. I just remember the backhaul was very very snowy for about 15 minutes.