hi,i was watching amc9 this morning and all of a sudden..signal gone,if any body else has lost signal please post it....thanks
amc9 gone?
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Is there a way we could put a sticky Alert thread at the top of the board listing alerts of any satellites that are down? That way we could prevent all these " I can't get satellite X , is it down?" threads.
Every location will be at a different time for any satellite. Check here to see when you will be affected:
Sun Outage Calculator
Check your eastern-most sat, and you will have the start of the sun outage for your whole arc.
Sun Outage Calculator
Check your eastern-most sat, and you will have the start of the sun outage for your whole arc.
Boy, this one had my brain spinning yesterday.
I usually don't bother using those solar outage sites, I just look at a program I wrote that gives the apparent latitude of the sun, and when that gets close to the my declination for satellites, which is between 6.0 and 6.7 degrees for me, then I know that it's time for solar outages.
When it's not been raining, I've been trying to tweak my alignment on my new SAMI, so when I saw your post yesterday, I first thought that I didn't think solar outage time was for another week or so, but I pulled up my program, and saw that the sun's latitude was about 3.5 deg, and for some reason, my brain was reversed into thinking that it came first for higher latitudes, and I thought, gosh, I've somehow missed it! I've been wanting to use the sun to help me check out my alignment, so I spent an hour printing out what time of day the sun would cross each satellite, planning to go out and watch the shadow of the feedhorn go over the center of my dish.
Well, the first sat was my nearly true south sat, ie AMC6. I went out at 12:38, and to my surprise, the shadow was about 2.5" BELOW the center of the dish, so I did a quick calculation showing that with my focal length times the sign of ~ 3.2 degrees, that the shadow should have been about 2.5" ABOVE the shadow, making the (INCORRECT) assumption that I had missed the solar outage, and the sun was below the arc for me.
So I got out my wrenches, and started messing with the elevation (mistake), making the shadow go about the center of the dish. I messed with this for about an hour, complicated by the fact that my trusty Channel Master meter apparently died (I think) while working, so I had to make changes, and run inside to look at signal levels. I was REALLY confused, because when the elevation was up where the shadows were telling me, the angle on my digital level was telling me that I was about 4 degrees too high, and while I was seemingly getting a signal indication there (before my meter died), it wasn't very strong (I think I was seeing side lobes from NIMIQ5). I was tearing what's left of my hair out trying to figure out what was wrong, this coupled with the fact that since NASA has left AMC6, there wasn't much 24/7 there to help locate the sat on the C-band side, other than that CW mux, so C-band doesn't give much in the way of meter response.
Anyway, I was so confused, that I decided to just put it back where I had it before, where the digital level said it was supposed to be, tuned in on that, and continued on with what I was doing tweaking the alignment...... but I was STILL VERY CONFUSED.
FINALLY, it dawned on me ..... the declinations AND the sun's latitude were NEGATIVE numbers, and the sun's -3.5 deg latitude was APPROACHING my -6.7 deg declination on AMC6, so I had NOT missed the solar outage period, it was still a few days away, but more importantly, the sun was still ABOVE the arc for me, not below, so the shadow was SUPPOSED to be 2.5" below center
............DUH.........
So I spent about 2 hours messing with something that didn't need to be messed with, ALL because I forgot that those numbers were negative.
FOOEY.
Anyway, looking at the program, I see that today, the sun's latitude is about 4 deg, which means that people down south are starting to see outages, but I'm still a day or two away, as the outage period drifts northward as the sun drifts southward.
One good thing about this time of year around here is the sun follows the satellite arc very closely!Very good time to see if trees or other things are blocking your LOS.
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