D* about to lose their transmission center?

[msajeff]

Chicago news was showing coverage of the wildfires and teased the story before the commercial with the comment that millions could possibly lose thier TV signal because of the fires. They never did say anything about it in the story. Then I remembered that D* has their transmission center there. So I'm curious...do they have a backup or are we looking at some serious issues if it goes up in flames?

 

[grydlok]

D has back up centers

 

[Claude Greiner]

Dish also has a backup uplink center also.

Its susposed to operate as a hot swap, meaning if one uplink center went down the other one would come live with an almost seemless transition

 

[broadcasttheworld]

Dish also has a backup uplink center also.

Its susposed to operate as a hot swap, meaning if one uplink center went down the other one would come live with an almost seemless transition

They were most likely talking about the microwave tower on top of Mount Wilson. We "AT&T" and just about every broadcast company has microwave repeaters up on that hill. Last count I got was 22 TV stations and 25 FM radio stations. All techs have been removed from those facilities for safety reasons. But have no fear most national providers "AT&T" / "Direct" / "Dish" have direct fiber to carry TV signals to the uplinks.

 

[rad]

AFAKI the DirecTV LA broadcast center is as 12700 Culver Blvd, Los Angeles CA.
Do a Google map on that and you'l see it's not near the area of the fire.

 

[goaliebob99]

I would think if something was ever to happen to the californa uplink they could allways swap everything over to the castle rock one. Directv doesnt have the multiple regional uplinks like how dish does, and I'm surprised that they dont.

 

[mikedz4]

All I know is they keep repeating how terrific a loss it would be if mt wilson burned. They said most broadcast towers are there as well as safety repeaters plus the observatory. They are trying to save it but it is still threatened.

 

[webdog]

It makes you wonder why they don't protect it better with backfires earlier in the season, etc. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

 

[cfb]

Eh, I'd take whatever directv says about backup sites with a grain of salt. I live near the capitol city of one of the largest state in the country. Two years ago we had some high winds. I mean, it was blowing out, but I drove in it. Knocked a couple of the broadcast station antennas over and we were without locals for 3 days and the signal quality was iffy for a couple of months after that. Directv and the local station engineers stated that their setup was 'world class' a few months after the outage.

My experience was a little different from that.

So directv, dish network, cable or OTA...make sure you have an alternative if getting a signal means anything to you.

 

[Claude Greiner]

Look at what happened in NY September 11th 2001 when the Trade center went down and took out several TV Stations.

A friend of mine who is a dealer actually had a customer bitching that he could not get WWOR out of NY. My friend was like, have you been watching the news lately? That plane hit the transmission tower for WWOR!