Pixelation and loss of signal on ESPN and other channels

[raoul5788]

???

He's an insider. He has numbers to the BC. Do you have that? Do we have that? No.

He explained in plain language why the problem could have gone on as long as it did.

 

[raoul5788]

Here, I've highlighted the pertinent passage for you.

The customer will usually know there is a problem well before people at the uplink center know. In fact, an intermittent problem can go on for hours and hours before anyone at ATT/DirecTV are aware of it due to the lack of people and the mostly automated monitoring systems. And there is no mechanism for the customer to let ATT/DirecTV know there is a problem, unless you know the specific broadcast center responsible for the outage and you have internal phone numbers to call.

I've called a broadcast center to ask what's going on and to make them aware of a problem in case they didn't know, but I have phone numbers and names. There have been other DTV employees who have called broadcast centers (not their own) from their home during an outage and demanded they do certain things to try and resolve it. That got them in some hot water, even though they were probably right.

 

[Inclined Orbit]

I lived through many, many lingering impairments and outages over the 18yrs I spent on the job. In the early days there were lots of people watching lots of live monitors that could catch minute problems and either switch to a backup or get people on it immediately. Now most everything is automated with very few eyeballs watching monitors and certain intermittent problems can go on for hours if the automation doesn't catch it to inform an operator.

However, the broadcast chain is very complicated and there are lots of problems that don't show themselves very easy and these get handed off to higher tier experts to diagnose. Often this takes time because the problem can be buried deep like a glitch in the compression system that nobody has ever seen before, or something not obvious in the IP stream or something in the RF chain that appears normal but is not. You can also have problems where the only solution would affect many more channels and they are hesitant to compound the outage.

When I hired in, every second of outage was an eternity and when an intercom went off announcing a problem we grabbed our tool kits and sprinted to the affected equipment area like it was the Olympics. Today, not so much. The broadcast chain has also gotten much more complicated over the years with everything being an IP stream and a problem in Southern California might require a team somewhere else in the country to help diagnose and reroute traffic, etc.

Nobody posting in this thread was at a broadcast center as far as I know, so we will never know the exact cause or fix for this specific problem. Based on the scope and duration of the problem I will go out on a limb on the DTV technical side and say people were probably on it very early and it was a whopper to fix.

 

[Inclined Orbit]

Sun spots have everything to do with HF radio propagation but nothing to do with satellite reception.

Could be sun spots like they have in May.

 

[hokie74]

I lived through many, many lingering impairments and outages over the 18yrs I spent on the job. In the early days there were lots of people watching lots of live monitors that could catch minute problems and either switch to a backup or get people on it immediately. Now most everything is automated with very few eyeballs watching monitors and certain intermittent problems can go on for hours if the automation doesn't catch it to inform an operator.

However, the broadcast chain is very complicated and there are lots of problems that don't show themselves very easy and these get handed off to higher tier experts to diagnose. Often this takes time because the problem can be buried deep like a glitch in the compression system that nobody has ever seen before, or something not obvious in the IP stream or something in the RF chain that appears normal but is not. You can also have problems where the only solution would affect many more channels and they are hesitant to compound the outage.

When I hired in, every second of outage was an eternity and when an intercom went off announcing a problem we grabbed our tool kits and sprinted to the affected equipment area like it was the Olympics. Today, not so much. The broadcast chain has also gotten much more complicated over the years with everything being an IP stream and a problem in Southern California might require a team somewhere else in the country to help diagnose and reroute traffic, etc.

Nobody posting in this thread was at a broadcast center as far as I know, so we will never know the exact cause or fix for this specific problem. Based on the scope and duration of the problem I will go out on a limb on the DTV technical side and say people were probably on it very early and it was a whopper to fix.

Thanks for the useful information you've provided. I would imagine that there are procedures that have to be followed also. You can't just jump in and start trying random things on a system that affects millions of viewers. There is always the possibility of breaking it worse than it already is.

 

[907TECH]

Could be sun spots like they have in May.

Those are not "sunspots", they are sun outages. Caused twice a year for several days, several minutes each day when the satellite is exactly between the sun and the satellite dish. It is RF noise from the sun raising the noise floor and obscuring the signal.

 

[rad]

When things that are obvious as being a BC problem the best way I've found to communicate the problem is via the Twitter account. I'm very specific saying please check with the broadcast center and what I've done to prove it's not an issue on my end.

 

[comp9]

Let’s just end this. It was aliens

 

[ejb1980]

Let’s just end this. It was aliens

Well, obviously.