SCVJeff wrote:
Bill.Satellite wrote:
Jeff,
Guess I am really confused now. "Predicted rain fade?" I have no idea how you want them to predict the weather. (That's a joke I know that's not what you meant.) If you are saying that the DirecTV or Dish signal is not as strong in various parts of the Country that kind of info is pretty well documented. It's up to the antenna owner to see what their signal strength numbers are and if they are dropping a call to DirecTV or Dish would be in order. The auto pointing dishes take care of that automatically every time they deploy but a home installation or a manual portable setup can change with time.
Assuming I am completely off-base, please let me know what you are referring to.
As I said above, on satellite as well as terrestrial microwave, there as very complex programs that run all the calculations and will tell you what the expected outage is in a given year of any given area, in minutes.. Obviously this doesn't go from storm to storm, but they contain loss averages in any given area in the country and formulas I don't pretend to understand, but they work. The footprints obviously are factored in, but what matters is the intensity of weather in any given area of the country. This has nothing to do with auto-pointing any things. It's all math: transponder power, antenna gain, path loss (and that includes weather), and finally the receive dish, then a report gets spit out.
If you had those lists, when someone says that their receiver is out 10min/month ( example), you could look at the charts and say, yeah it's possible since the charts predict 120min service loss per yr, and this is awfully close. Or the charts say 4min/yr, in which case you say with confidence that something is clearly broken.
Ever wonder why satellite or microwave antennas are the size they are? This is exactly what determines all if this. While it all may seem pretty generic in consumer land, there is allot of science that went into the determination of what works (usually) and what doesn't.
I guess I was not off base and you actually were hoping that I might be able to get someone at Winegard to predict the weather. If you need to know when you might lose signal you could always consult the Farmer's Almanac or just watch the local weather forecast. The solar outages are extremely predictable. Weather? Not so much!
