Friday 20 November 2009

How Satellite TV Sends And Recieves Signals

By Sam Bousaks

Scientific types may want to turn away. This is a very short, yet interesting, explanation of how does satellite TV work. Even though it has become very popular in the last few years, satellite TV has been around for a long time. The first satellite for TV was put into orbit in'62.

Back then people who wanted satellite for their televisions had to use a nine foot dish that they put in their back yards. They were really big, ugly, and gave an incredible variety of channels from other countries that made them totally worth the effort. Some people still have those dishes in their back yards. When somebody wants to get channels from a different country they call the neighbors to help them move the dish a tad. There were remotes included with the dishes but those were lost years ago.

Besides that a person who had one of these dishes was not required to mow about half of the lawn, you had unlimited television channels. Most of the channels came from other countries. This was because no one who owned a dish actually knew where to point it to get specific channels. So, a person in one region could get channels from a country thousands of miles away.

Once the satellites became more popular, providers started shooting satellites with transponders up regularly. These geostationary satellites orbit at the same speed as the earth so they don't seem to be moving. This made reception even better and it was lots easier to find channels and countries because the satellites were identified. As people became more knowledgeable about where satellites were located they started creating their own programming guides. Those have now been replaced with the onscreen guides provided by the satellites.

Well, nine foot dishes just have never really caught on as a yard ornament in cities and they wanted satellite television also. So, satellite providers came up with little'" dishes that could be put just about anywhere on a house with a clear southern exposure and started beaming programs from all of the satellites to the dishes. No more calling the neighbors to move the dish, just a little dish stuck on the side of a building that was easy to move and 500 or so channels to choose from.

In cities however, obstruction was a problem and that is how "spot beams" were born. The satellites beam a signal to the spot beam, that beams a signal to the dish, that beams a signal to the receiver. This solved the problem of getting a signal just about anywhere in a metropolitan area easily.

Because the whole satellite system runs on radio signals, the satellite guys found that it saved a lot of space if they encoded the signals digitally and shot all the channels across the same bandwidth. They now have signals available in both standard and HDTV format going out twenty four hours a day.

If you'd like to learn more about how does satellite TV work there are many websites that have all of the scientific information about each part of the system. However, sometimes a short version followed by a satellite broadcast movie is better.

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