D11 outage 2/27/2024 (Resolved on 2/28)

[Richfunb]

All of my satellite channels have come back online except for two - ESPN (channel 206) and ESPN2 (channel 209). They still default to an internet connection. This is especially weird in that the other ESPN channels (207 and 208) are being received from the satellite. Unless some of the ESPN channels are on different satellites, I can't figure out the problem.

 

[KyL416]

You must have some other issue going on as ESPN and ESPN2 were not affected by the D11 outage. Check your signal levels, both of them are on D14/99ca TPN 23 along with USAHD, TNTHD and GolfHD

207 ESNHD is on D14/99ca TPN 15
208 ESPNUHD is on D12/103ca TPN 15

 

[Richfunb]

You must have some other issue going on as ESPN and ESPN2 were not affected by the D11 outage. Check your signal levels, both of them are on D14/99ca TPN 23 along with USAHD, TNTHD and GolfHD

207 ESNHD is on D14/99ca TPN 15
208 ESPNUHD is on D12/103ca TPN 15

Thank you for the info. You were correct that my ESPN issue had nothing to do with the satellite problem. I discovered that the wind had blown a lawn chair against the dish base (it's on the ground) and it had moved a just a fraction of an inch. I gently moved the base back to its former position and both channels came back on.

 

[raoul5788]

Thank you for the info. You were correct that my ESPN issue had nothing to do with the satellite problem. I discovered that the wind had blown a lawn chair against the dish base (it's on the ground) and it had moved a just a fraction of an inch. I gently moved the base back to its former position and both channels came back on.

You should check all of the bolts/nuts and make sure they are tight.

 

[TheTechGuru]

D11 & D12 have identical spot beam configurations, so worst case if one of them completely failed I suppose they could double up the channels on every beam. That would mean halving the bit rate for each channel, so quality would take a hit, but MPEG4 compressors have improved since those satellites were launched so while it would be noticeable it wouldn't be like stepping down to SD quality.

The national channels could divide the hit across four satellites (or maybe cause them to bite the bullet and finally drop MPEG2 SD entirely) so it would be almost unnoticeable, especially if they took some rarely viewed channels from MPEG4 HD to MPEG4 SD to allowing preserving the same bandwidth for the most viewed channels.

Question. Would it be possible for them to go back to Ku only if their next generation of receivers and all channels were switched to HEVC/H.265 ? Even if not, moving to HEVC/H.265 would allow them to continue offering service with less satellites correct?

 

[KyL416]

In order to go HEVC only, they would have to replace every existing Hx2x receiver out there and switch all Genies to headless server mode as they all came out before chipsets capable of natively decoding HEVC were available and are not powerful enough to software decode HD HEVC video.

That just covers national channels though. The spotbeam satellite in the 101 slot is being retired in a few months, so for most markets the only source of locals will be 99s and/or 103s

There's also some data that has to be delivered via regular DSS transponders in order for the receivers to boot up, so they can't convert every Ku-band transponder DVB-S2 mode.

 

[slice1900]

In order to go HEVC only, they would have to replace every existing Hx2x receiver out there and switch all Genies to headless server mode as they all came out before chipsets capable of natively decoding HEVC were available and are not powerful enough to software decode HD HEVC video.

That just covers national channels though. The spotbeam satellite in the 101 slot is being retired in a few months, so for most markets the only source of locals will be 99s and/or 103s

There's also some data that has to be delivered via regular DSS transponders in order for the receivers to boot up, so they can't convert every Ku-band transponder DVB-S2 mode.

They'd also have to replace all the HR34/H44/HR44 out there.