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.
When it all started there were not a lot of satellites up and most people who wanted to get satellite television had huge gray satellite dishes planted in their back yards. There are still some of these around. They are usually about nine feet in diameter and when somebody wants to move the dish to get a different country’s programs it is a group effort. They originally came with remote controls, but those were lost several years ago so the dish gets turned manually.
At that time, and for several years after, no one who owned the dishes really knew which satellites were plugged into which countries. So, you would move the dish until you picked up a country that looked good and watch it for a few days or months until you moved the dish again. Sometimes you landed on your own country, most times you didn’t. But, it was fun and all countries have unique television programs that aren’t seen in other countries.
So, as the popularity of satellite televisions grew they started shooting more satellites up that had transponders on them. They called these geostationary satellites because they are orbiting at the same speed as the earth so they aren’t really moving anymore than we are. This made reception easier to achieve and if you knew where a satellite was you could point the nine foot dish at the satellite and watch a different countries stuff. It was still pretty cool.
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.
The satellite guys made other advancements too. They learned that by encoding the signals digitally they could cram more channels into the same bandwidth. So there are over 500 channels being shot across the same bandwidth twenty-four hours a day in both HDTV and standard formats.
So, for unscientific types that were wondering how does satellite TV work, there you have it. A really complex system that works really well.
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