Rain fade with SWM

[yawn9]

Hello,

Does SWM artificially inflate signal readings due to it being a powered system? I had my DirecTV installed at my apartment late last year, and the signal did not go out once during the winter even with the heavy snow and ice. However, storm season is starting, and the signal is lost from about 5 minutes before a storm starts (a little earlier than when you start to see lightning overhead) until after the storm has passed over. This also happens with moderately heavy rain and no lightning. This did not happen with the unpowered 1-bird setup I had years ago in St. Louis--back then the signal would only drop out in the heaviest of storms.

My signal readouts are all high-90s, with a few 100s. Currently I'm using 3 tuners from my SWM-8: two for an HR21, and one for a H21.

Is there anything that could be wrong with this setup to cause this? The location of my living room means I cannot pull in the local stations OTA, and the signal dropping out so early means I can't get an accurate assessment of the storm since I usually watch previously recorded programs in the evening.

 

[vurbano]

The new band some of the sats use is much more susceptable to rain fade. That and the fact that now you are trying to hit multiple birds adds to the difficulty. Same thing here. Readings in the 100's and high 90's but I can lose signal from cloud cover. Technically rainfade can occur without it even raining on you. You just need thickk enough clouds passing through the line of sight. Pizza dish satellite has always had this problem and they have never solved it. you will get an endless chorus of fanboys chime in next saying they never lose signal for whatever their reasons. I'd suggest looking up "rainfade" and making your own decisions.

There are, however, some disadvantages of Ku band system. Especially at frequencies higher than 10 GHz in heavy rain fall areas, a noticeable degradation occurs, due to the problems caused by and proportional to the amount of rainfall (commonly known as "rain fade").[5] This problem can be mitigated, however, by deploying an appropriate link budget strategy when designing the satellite network, and allocating a higher power consumption to reduce rain fade loss. The Ku band is not only used for television transmission, which some sources imply, but also very much for digital data transmission via satellites, and for voice/audio transmissions.
The higher frequency spectrum of the Ku band is particularly susceptible to signal degradation, considerably more so than C-band satellite frequency spectrum. A similar phenomenon, called "snow fade" (where snow or ice accumulation significantly alters the focal point of a dish) can also occur during winter precipitation. Also, the Kuband satellites typically require considerably more power to transmit than the C-band satellites. Under both "rain fade" and "snow fade" conditions, Ka and Ku band losses can be marginally (but significantly) reduced using super-hydrophobic Lotus effect coatings.

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_band"]Ku band - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

 

[Rey]

i agree with vurbano. this is normal. though i get less rain fade than i did with E. i also have my signals in the 90's and 100. if the storm approaching has very thick clouds you can kiss the signal goodbye for a bit. you'll notice the HD channels will go out before the sd channels that are on a different sat. the newer sats are more susceptible to rain fade. next time your hd channels lose signal try one of the sd channels. rain fade is inevitable. just keep your dish peaked to help minimize rain fade

 

[ChrisK114]

Yep, The HD channels will most likely go in rain. That is the one bad thing about satellite. With D* it is a lot better than with E*. I would lose signal if it looked like it might rain with E*.

 

[Bob Nielsen]

The "signal" numbers aren't really a measure of signal strength, but are related to bit-error rate. They are somewhat dependent on signal-to-noise ratio (also multipath, etc.), but that should be determined at the LNB, not further downstream. Any gain in the SWM shouldn't have an effect.