SBS6 has always been fuzzy

[JerryK]

Hi all,

I've had my 4dtv (922) for a year now, and I can generally get every satellite from west to north without difficulty. (I'm in Michigan)


SBS6 is for me just a hair past south -- a stretch for my actuator but it gets there -- however anything I find is always really weak, with visible static. I'd say a signal above 50 or 60 is rare.


So is that bird weak, or is my dish perhaps a little off?

 

[Shawn95GT]

I noticed the same with my dish. It made it hard to even store the 'B6' position.

I assumed it was just Ku being it's picky self and something wasn't spot on with my dish's alighnment.

With my smaller Ku dish I never had any problems with SBS6. I'll have to pick up another analog reciever (I knew I shouldn't have gave all mine away!) for the Analog B6 goodies.

 

[tdti1]

Many feeds on that bird are from a live satellite truck, and will need a dish peaked well to get a nice signal.

 

[awh]

SBS-6 is actually a relatively high-power Ku satellite. However, what some uplinkers will do is take a full transponder and split it into two, an upper and lower which cuts the effective radiated power in half. Sometimes you’ll see slate that say “XPDR-9U” or XPDR-9L” the U & L are for the upper and lower half of that transponder.

Another thing that can make Ku birds seem weaker is using the wrong receive bandwidth, on my Chaparral Monterey receiver I can select between 4 different bandwidths and for most full Ku transponders 26 or 36MHz works well, with 14 or 20MHz being used for the split transponders.


Tony
Home Page - http://www.cyberspace.org/~awh/
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[vfrjim]

SBS6 is to be replaced

From Intelisat's 10Q:

On August 1, 2005, we formed our second 50-50 joint venture with JSAT, a leading satellite operator in the Asia-Pacific region, that will build and launch a Ku-band satellite to replace our SBS-6 satellite at 74 degrees west longitude. The joint venture is named Horizons-2. The satellite will support digital video, HDTV and IP-based content distribution networks to broadband Internet and satellite news gathering services (SNG) in the United States. This Horizons-2 satellite is currently being constructed and is expected to be in service by late 2007.

So, maybe it will get better when it is replaced, who knows.