Re: Sun outage today?

letshaveit@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

I have just set up my own dish so I was eager to check it's alignment
today as I understood that, with today being the spring equinox, there
should be significant interference affecting reception as the sun will
be directly behind Astra 2D. Outage was due in London between 10:02
and 10:12 but I didn't see any of the expected reduction in signal
quality.

Also the shadow of the LNB was right at the bottom of the dish - along
the line of the arm but somewhere I seem to have read that the shadow
of the LNB should be in the middle of the dish at the time of outage.
Is this right?

The sun outage was 3 weeks ago, on March 1st. It's early because the
dish actually looks 'down' to the Clarke belt, so the sun needs to be
below the equator (in the Northern hemisphere). It will go behind
the 28.2E orbital slot again on 11th October at about 9:43 am BST.

With the right equipment you can check the dish pointing by using
the sun, but the speed with which it moves across the sky makes it
useless to line up the dish. The DVB-S2 card in my media server
makes available a S/N ratio variable. I sampled this every
minute on 3 transponders while the sun scanned across on several
days. The maximum S/N ratio drop was about 3dB. I discovered my
dish had moved during some episode of high winds, but I needed the
signal meter to line it up again.

J

.

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