XDS Satellite Issues

[RadioTN]

We're perplexed....and looking for anyone else who's experienced this....

Suddenly this summer, our entire fleet of XDS receivers -- Cumulus, Premiere, Max, Wegner -- would fail together. Happened regularly around 6:30p at night. They would go down for 5 to 20 minutes and come back up.

We were told by someone within industry to put a filter to eliminate noise/interference. We've checked with local cell companies about the usage of a new band that sometimes interferes.

This has worked....but we still have intermittent outages....for seemingly no reason....like one this morning for 2-3 minutes.

Has anyone inexperienced this? Any suggestions?

 

[tpt]

http://www.microwavefilter.com/c-band_radar_elimination.htm

The airborne radar is on the edge of the C-band downlink frequencies from the satellites. There are also military altimeters on the other edge of C-band.


As the site notes, helps with other adjacent band sources of information. If you can borrow a spectrum analyzer--especially one with a powered tap--grab a spare LNB & plug it into the analyzer. Then when the feeds go down swing the LNB around (just the LNB--you don't need any kind of dish) and see if you can spot anything on the spectrum analyzer. Will give you an idea what direction the interference is coming from.

Remember the LNB block converts signals down to L band--and on the spectrum analyzer the display is inverted--the higher frequencies are on the lower side (left) of the display. So spikes on the left edge of the display would indicate upper adjacent interference.

 

[boiseengineer]

Had an 950 MHz Armstrong STL transmitter that was spurring in the C band. Added an external low-pass filter.
No spectrum analyzer here. Used the trusty old Icom R7000 receiver to find it.

 

[bigdonho]

SunOutage?

Had the same problem here in the Florida Keys at all three receive locations at the same time. Turned out the be Sun Fade. What threw me off was how late in the day and late in the year it was happening. If all of the receivers are looking at the same bird they would all go out at once. Are you still having the same problem or has it resolved itself?

We're perplexed....and looking for anyone else who's experienced this....

Suddenly this summer, our entire fleet of XDS receivers -- Cumulus, Premiere, Max, Wegner -- would fail together. Happened regularly around 6:30p at night. They would go down for 5 to 20 minutes and come back up.

We were told by someone within industry to put a filter to eliminate noise/interference. We've checked with local cell companies about the usage of a new band that sometimes interferes.

This has worked....but we still have intermittent outages....for seemingly no reason....like one this morning for 2-3 minutes.

Has anyone inexperienced this? Any suggestions?

 

[Bill_981]

Had the same problem here in the Florida Keys at all three receive locations at the same time. Turned out the be Sun Fade. What threw me off was how late in the day and late in the year it was happening. If all of the receivers are looking at the same bird they would all go out at once. Are you still having the same problem or has it resolved itself?

Sun outages shouldn't come as a surprise. They're entirely predictable,. There are on-line calculators for predicting sun-outage times for any place on the planet.

Late in the year? That would be somewhere around the autumnal equinox. Actually a little later. And yes, in Florida, stations looking at AMC-8 (which is almost anybody taking a satellite feed) the outage is late in the day because of the low look angle.

Don't forget about the other outage period. It occurs around the vernal equinox. Same reason, about the same time of day. Usually the networks send out reminders well ahead of time so as to not catch you off guard.

If you have an outage any other time of year, then you have a problem to investigate.