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Can't Find a Place To Put a Network Satellite Dish -- Help!

E

everydayguy

A new radio station I'm associated with is needing to install its first sat dish for a network feed. The network is on C-Band and according to the syndicator, they require a minimum ten-foot dish. The station is located in the Southwest U-S.

However, there is no space for the dish -- we can't put it on the studio roof, there's no land adjacent the station to install the dish, and there's no room at the transmitter site.

Any ideas about how we can get the network feed? Neither an internet feed nor a ku-band feed is an option since it is not offered that way by the network....it's C-band or nothing.

Thanks in advance for any ideas you have on how to solve this.
 
The SW USA is generally a good place for a BUD due to clear skies and lack of ice/snow (except in the mountains). You didn't say exactly where the dish was to be located but it was my experience in the Phoenix area that 10 and 7-foot dishes were pretty interchangeable. If the dish is not required to move do you have room for a 7-footer?

Failing that, can you locate the BUD nearby and install some sort of link to your antenna farm? Microwave perhaps?
 
WHERE is the nearest land that you CAN use?

There are L-band fiber-optic links that can go for a mile or more. You could find a private path for the fiber, or rent fiber from someone else....Cable TV company, or private link provider.
There are ways to shield the dish from view, as well as from interference. A partial wall, or some shrubbery will make it more "neighbor friendly" You could almost rent some space in somebody's back yard nearby.
How about a nearby school or Church that has some lawn space? Cell providers rent rooftop space (at a premium price) all the time. Ground-level space shouldn't cost nearly as much, and would be a nice little bit of "spare change" for an entity like that.

We have dishes in a parking lot, and other stations downtown have them on parking garages.
 
Any land that you could get a T1, ISDN, or STL shot would be an option. Also, might be awkward, but if there is a friendly competitor, non-comm, or TV station that might let you split off their dish and back-haul it via T1 to your studios.
 
Somebody signed a contract without knowing whether the station could actually receive the signal from the satellite?
There may not be a simple, inexpensive solution.
Where are you located? Please tell us why there is no room for such a small (10') dish.
 
Does the station have its own parking lot?

I used to work for a station that had a Simul-Sat (look them up, they are huge) mounted on a beefy truss assembly in the back of the building. This raised it high enough so that vehicles could be parked underneath. Those coveted spots, right next to the back door, were reserved for the GM and the owner.

I would think you could do something similar for a standard 3m dish. Downside is that it makes dish maintenance and snow removal (if that is of concern) more of a chore.
 
We had a similar problem, though for a different reason. We were getting our AC programming from (what was then) ABC satellite with no problem. We signed up for Delilah, which was from Premier. Different transponder, but same satellite. Didn't work. A little research discovered an adjacent, active feed from MCI aimed at a tower behind us--and directly at our dish.

So, working with a friendly competitor, we licensed a discrete STL system, planning to use a subcarrier geni and DTMF tones triggered by the net cues. Would have worked well, but in the interim we were able to track down the MCI engineer who was delighted to have an excuse to kill that particular link.

The friendly broadcaster-who had been offered the other subcarrier for his AM feed, promptly took up our offer to use the inter-city relay to feed his AM (which had been fed off-air from a distant FM). His off-air pickup point was our studio, so this worked well (we sold him the AM--he had an STL feed from our hill to the AM stick in the valley).

Long story--short answer: Buy an STL-10 system (or a pair for stereo) and find someplace with an STL shot to the studio. Perhaps your GM's back yard. ;D You can find a pair of STL-10's at very reasonable prices-$1k to $1.5K depending on condition. You will need the STL antennas ($1.2K for Scala's) & $450 for coordination and licensing. I have a brand-new pair of 39 khz subcarrier geni's for the STL-10's I'll be happy to sell you, the Broadcast Tools DTMF encoders/decoders work quite well. Then there is the cost of the dish, but unless you are in the east,(looking at AMC-8), the 8 footers should work--if you can find them. Better to go with a bigger dish.
 
One option that some stations use is the dish located at the transmitter. It's a real pain as you have to get the audio back to the studio and most major radio networks want the receivers connected to the Internet. One advantage to having the dish at the transmitter is possible availability of emergency programming (direct from the sat receiver).

Bob
 
I'd find someone else in the market, Radio, TV whatever, who has a dish aimed at the right sat and then link back to the station via a quality link. A 15Khz eq'd phone line, T1, STL or whatever it takes. To keep it cheap you could always pull a trade with a business in the area to put it on their roof and link back from there. Look for other dishes in the neighborhood and you might find one that is already in place.
 
Station "we" absorbed used the DTMF setup TomT suggested.
The DTMF tones were on a subcarrier channel from the remote satellite site.
Main channel had the programming.
And another audio channel was on a second subcarrier channel.

Since their transmitter's STL was pointed towards the remote satellite site they had a RX there.
They sent DTMF on it on a subcarrier back to the remote satellite site to switch satellite channels/transponders.
With XDS you just schedule it on the website!
 
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