BBC Channels to move to Astra 1N

Skanco

Does this not come over as some kind of double standard? When RTE cannot overspill the island of Ireland.

BBC Channels to move to Astra 1N Friday 24th February 2012
The BBC channels, BBC1, BB2, BBC3, BBC4, BBC1HD, BBCHD, CBBC, CBeebies, will be moving from Astra 2D to Astra 1N this coming Friday.

There will be no change of frequencies.
The BBC channels will be using the same frequencies as they currently do.

However, this will mean that reception of these BBC channels in Spain will be much better than currently.
In some areas, they should be able to be received on a small 80cm or 1m satellite dish, where are previously they may not have been available even on a 2.4m satellite dish.

This follows the recent move of the ITV and channel 4 group of channels to Astra 1N in the last few weeks.[/SIZE]

Ronnie Raygun

1N will eventually piss off to 19.2 east. Do you know what the footprints of 2E & 2F will be like?

paulcdub85

Will this mean theese channels will have to be rescannd on free-to-air box's?

excollier

Don't see it as any sort of problem. Happy days for ex-pats
BBC, ITV, CH4 et al pay a lot more than the Irish broadcasters for programme rights. Overspill into a foreign language territory probably is not the same as overspill into a very much larger same language territory ( ie Ireland into Britain ).
Anyway Astra 1N is temporary, it's long term replacement might have a very different footprint.

Ronnie Raygun beat me to that point

Skanco

Astra 2E, Astra 2F and Astra 2G will serve to deliver next generation broadcast, VSAT and broadband services in Europe and Africa, and will carry Ku-and Ka-band payloads at 28.2° E. Astra 5B will be deployed at the orbital position 31.5° E extending SES Astra's transponder capacity and geographical reach over Eastern European and neighbouring markets for DTH, Direct-to-Cable and contribution feeds to Digital Terrestrial Television networks.
Lots more spot beams, but no footprints published that I know about.

Skanco

There will be no change of frequencies.

The BBC channels will be using the same frequencies as they currently do.
So no need to rescan.

Is 2D being decommissioned? From what I can see it only has 5 active transponders left.

NUTZZ

The Irish channels (RTE 1 & 2, TV3 AND TG4) all moved to Astra 1N also.

watty

Satellites are only "decommissioned" if they run out of station keeping fuel or there is a imminent Power supply problem.

Skanco

No known problems with Astra 2D, only about 9 years old. Launch date, 19 December 2000, I think it will be in service for a little longer

mike65

I guess they can keep it as back up or for other data traffic.

carrotcake

I'm looking at http://www.satlaunch.net/2011/08/astra-1n-coverage-footprint-maps.html and see that there are three beams - UK and Pan Europe 1 and 2. Will BBC, RTÉ, etc just be on the UK spot beam? I'd like to get to get Sky set up over here in Romania, but if it won't be possible to get these channels then I might not bother.

Skanco

Skanco wrote: »

No known problems with Astra 2D, only about 9 years old. Launch date, 19 December 2000, I think it will be in service for a little longer

Its planned lifetime was 12 years so it should be good for another year. Will probably go inclined in the next year or two.

"Known" is the operative word though. SES never publicly admitted a problem with Astra 1B but it was known to be somewhat unstable. I'd also be very surprised if their entire fleet of HS-601s have been fault free - other operators such as PanAmSat and DirecTV have had terrible trouble with their 601s. Mostly processor and battery failures.

watty

The spot beam is the logical one.