Satellite & Lightning

Furp

Just wondering had some pretty heavy thunder & lightning showers down my way yesterday (Navan) and on the Sky Satellite the picture kept breaking up and the signall lost.

I plugged the system out then as the lightning got closer as a precaution as I didnt want it hitting my dish, although i don't know what the chances of this are but my last house was hit by lightning through a cablelink cable blowing my tv and video.

I was wondering though what do they do in the areas in the states that have a pretty high concentration of lightning storms such as florida and the mid west, do they use DTV on cable or is the satellite signal stronger to accomadate the interference from the storms.

SRB

There was serious disruption to the Uplinks in the London/Southeast of England areas during the storms the other day, Pictures were freezing and breaking up.

irishgeo

Furp wrote:

Just wondering had some pretty heavy thunder & lightning showers down my way yesterday (Navan) and on the Sky Satellite the picture kept breaking up and the signall lost.

I plugged the system out then as the lightning got closer as a precaution as I didnt want it hitting my dish, although i don't know what the chances of this are but my last house was hit by lightning through a cablelink cable blowing my tv and video.

I was wondering though what do they do in the areas in the states that have a pretty high concentration of lightning storms such as florida and the mid west, do they use DTV on cable or is the satellite signal stronger to accomadate the interference from the storms.

thought the box was built to detect lighting and turn itself off.

Zaphod

Furp wrote:

I was wondering though what do they do in the areas in the states that have a pretty high concentration of lightning storms such as florida and the mid west, do they use DTV on cable or is the satellite signal stronger to accomadate the interference from the storms.

You can buy surge protectors that sit between the LNBF and receiver, but by all accounts they are a waste of money, as the receiver will have blown long before the surge protector. They can drop signal strength by a few dBs too.

Another thing to try is to earth the dish with a copper bar going into the ground, but this is no guarantee either.

Your best protection by far is to remove the coax from the back of the receiver when there's lightning in the vicinity.

As for interference, in the States they used to primarily use C-Band (3.4-4.2GHz), although Ku-band is making inroads. For a given amount of rain/moisture in the atmosphere, the signal attenuation will be about 10 times greater for Ku-band than C-band.

Mike 1972

Unless the dish is mounted above your chimney I wouldnt worry too much about lightning hitting the dish but I would unplug the mains and particularly the telephone line