FTA Satellite Signal Disrupted by Rain

druidlady

Hi out there,
Can anyone help me with my FTA satellite system that looses the signal to some channels in heavy rain, though strangely enough not in wind and rain, just the heavy stuff we get during our so called summers!!

Is there a booster or something that I could get? or anything else that might help,

thanks

Tony

Its most likely the dish is not aligned correctly.

Trevord

Is it possible that even with a properly aligned dish you can still experience pixelation when you get really heavy rain like there has been in some places over the last few days ?

I had a high drop in signal last night just before and during a really heavy shower. I have 100% signal quality normally.

Tony

Trevord wrote: »

Is it possible that even with a properly aligned dish you can still experience pixelation

If the dish is properly aligned, the right size, with the correct LNB and good quality cable you should not experience pixellation even in heavy rain.

ISAA

I had the same problem yesterday, transponder C4 on 28 degs east, which is a weak transponder,

signal with a 65cm triax dish @ dish = 81db, MER = 12.5db

most other transponders are stronger, ie : 2d

and my dish is beamed prefect :

Joey the lips

I loose signal temp with heavy rain. It does not happen much so I am not too bothered. My dish is aligned with the neighbourhood and its a sky dish.

My point for telling you this is not to dispute whats said above but to give you my opinion that its not only happening on FTA.

watty

Badly aligned dish. Alignment needs a meter. You can't do it by eye like a TV aerial pointing the same way.

Nothing to do with FTA or Sky / Pay versions.

If you are somewhat in the West side of Ireland (North, middle or south) an 80cm dish is a better rain margin. I did lose Sky once though on 95cm. But the rain was so heavy that 2mins was flooding and though mid-day, so heavy that the darkening made street lights all go on.

druidlady

Hi all
thanks for all the information, don't know what size dish I'm using looks the same as all the others around here, and it was installed professionally a couple of years ago, so I have to hope it was installed properly :rolleyes:

So from what you all said there is nothing I can do besides having the dish and system checked?

watty

Dish alignment and cable type/quality.

The signal can't be "boosted" on the cable*. That's just like turning up the volume on bad reception as the most important part of the Satellite reception is Dish to "collect" signal and the LNB part on the arm, which is the most important part of the receiver. Unless it gets a enough signal focused on it, any thing else is like a car radio with the aerial snapped off.



(* There are "boosters" but they only work with perfect signal already to drive a very long cable, say 60m to 250m long. The signal from the LNB to the setbox is not actually the satellite signal but an "IF" signal that on normal TV and Radio is inside the receiver. On Satellite they put that part of the receiver on the dish arm as satellite signals can't really go down more than a few inch/cms of very expensive wire.)

Trevord

While we are on this subject, I'll ask a question that I've been wondering about for a while.

Does the brand of LNB make any difference ? Assuming the LNB is of the correct type for the dish, are some LNB brands known to be better than others at collecting the signal ?

Tony

Very little difference in the sky lnb's but on non sky dishes brands like invacom and smart make excellent low noise lnb's