astraboy

Its pissing down here and once again, the sky has crapped out.
Can anyone tell me why it does this?
Its bloody annoying.
astraboy.

Guinness

iTrader: (1)

Mine aswell............

ade748

The signal is effectively reduced to the point where it is no longer locked onto the Astra 2D satellite, due to atmospheric conditions I guess. Happening here in Switz right now. Surprised it's happening back in blighty though, I'd have thought the satellite footprint was strong enough back there to handle a little cloud and a storm.

ade748

Meant to add, can you get to it? Maybe try rotating the LNB a bit.....

astraboy

You still here?

astraboy.

ronjeramy

iTrader: (1)

thought digital was effected by the weather

hedgehog

Rain absorbs some of the signal getting beamed down to you from the satellite, in much the same way as the energy in a microwave oven is converted into heat in the water molecules that it happens to meet on its travels. The actual signal level when compared to the noise level with digital satellite transmissions is not that huge and so it doesn't take much attenuation to put the signal down below the noise and then your box can't discriminate it from the noise, so you lose the picture. When you consider the very tiny amount of power the satellite transmits and the huge area of the earth this transmission is spread over it is a miracle it works at all, never mind when it is being attenuated by a rain storm.

Scooby-Doo

It has really rained hard in south London and I have been just under full signal strength and quality all day

Rabid

Depends which transponder you are 'looking at'. You'll find different channels on different transponders have different levels of signal quality.

Most weather related problems are due to crappy equipment supplied by those arch a55holes SKYTV- "the television choice of imbeciles"

shooter007

as scooby doo says brill in london area it depends where you live sky is roughly aimed at london and as you go up country you realy need a bigger dish but for money reasons sky try and get away with the minimum size try going up one size i did (west yorks) and no problem now even if snow acumulates (if it ever will again) 80% + all time good luck steve .

SWRTWannabe

You'd think they'd fly the satellites lower, then the signal would be stronger. If they were low enough so you could see them, it would make setting them up easier too.....

Shark Man

Strange how rain absorps the radio waves. Yet you can put a plastic bag over the LNB without any affect. (Plastic bag helps protect it from the elements - and old trick from yesteryear when they used to cost alot more and weren't as reliable against water ingress )

Bubba po

The affect/effect atrocities on this thread are appalling.

Shark Man

aff off

Criss

My freeview doesnt work when the weather is good but I get full signal when its awefull

King RA

Because the signal is from UNDER the clouds, so uses them to reflect off. A satellite is ABOVE the clouds, so they act as a barrier, planes would probably get better signals if that had sky

davegtt

Cable all the way No problems here.

Shark Man

Cable used to suffer from bad weather too. As they too used to recieve the signal from the Astra satelites (as per sky) , prior to uplinking to the cable network.

There was a time with analogue cable (back when it was called Cable Midlands). The recieving centre wasn't far away from where we lived, and we suffered the same signal issues as with sattelite in heavy rain storms

Leslie

The pretty high UHF frequency and its low power signal are easily blocked by heavy rain. As Hedgehog said, the heavy rain absorbs the signal energy.

Les

spectrum48k

my Sky box used to suffer massively when it rained

Quick engineer visit to adjust alignment and it no longer goes off during rainy conditions now.