Satellite picture during heavy rain.

[Mjc]

Bear with me as a new "convert" to satellite TV.
Whenever we get medium to heavy rain, we lose picture and sound - or rather, we sometimes have an unwatchable fragmented and jerky picture.
Is this always the case with satellite, or is it a badly aligned dish/LNB?
Can anything be done to correct, or at least, improve the reception during rain?
If not, is this not a great weakness od digital/satellite TV?

[Nick Trollope]

>Is this always the case with
>satellite, or is it a
>badly aligned dish/LNB?

It can be (yes to both questions). Have the alignment & the skew checked by someone with a digital sat. meter. I doubt if you can do it accurately enough with a cheap meter or the guage on the digibox.

>Can anything be done to correct,
>or at least, improve the
>reception during rain?

Check/try the following (apart fom above);

Is there anything (such as a tree) that is anything in the line of the sat dish. Remember that a standard Sky sat dish looks "up" (not in the vertical direction is appears to be pointing). Especially when the tree is laden with water, e.g.

Have you a long cable run from the LNB to the box? Change the coax to the best quality you can find & ensure that the plugs are put on properly.

Change the LNB for a better one (especially if you are using one of the "standard" Sky-suplied ones).

Some Digiboxes are poorer performers (on the margins) than others - early Amstrads & Paces' for example.

A Sky minidish should work all over France, but you could consider upping the dish size. Buy a good one, however, as some of the Brico/Supermarket 80cm dishes are no better than the standard Sky (Triax) dish.

Pray for decent weather. The rest of us (In Britany at least) would be grateful.

Nick
http://www.aplaceinfrance.com

[A_Redman]

We run the smallest size sky mini dish just South of Limoges with a 25 metre cable. We loose the signal during violent thunderstorms but not during heavy rain. The SKY 60 cm dish is about equivalent to a 80 cm normal French dish for receiving SKY. My experience of a number of SKY alignments is that provided you get signal quality above half way on the on screen meter then it works perfectly in France. Larger French purchased dishes seem harder to align. The last UK purchased dish and LNB which I set up for a friend did not even have a start point for skew alignment

My sole experience of French digital set up was that the onscreen meter responded faster than SKY and as a consequnce set up was easier and much faster.

[Paul_Gyn]

[quote]We run the smallest size sky mini dish just South of Limoges with a 25 metre cable. We loose the signal during violent thunderstorms but not during heavy rain. The SKY 60 cm dish is about equivalent t...[/quote]

...Larger French purchased dishes seem harder to align. ....

 

the bigger the dish: the smaller the beam-width : the harder the damn-thing is to align.

 

paul

[Gwynydd]

[quote]We run the smallest size sky mini dish just South of Limoges with a 25 metre cable. We loose the signal during violent thunderstorms but not during heavy rain. The SKY 60 cm dish is about equivalent t...[/quote]

"The SKY 60 cm dish is about equivalent to a 80 cm normal French dish for receiving SKY."

I'm not doubting any of what you say but I would be interested to know how you have measured this? Did you use the same LNB on both dishes? Did you compare measurements from the same location and at the same time with identical weather conditions? Did you actually measure the signal strength and the signal quality or just compare the two on the digibox signal test screen?

[Hegs]

[quote]"The SKY 60 cm dish is about equivalent to a 80 cm normal French dish for receiving SKY." I'm not doubting any of what you say but I would be interested to know how you have measured this? Did you use...[/quote]

>"The SKY 60 cm dish is about equivalent to a 80 cm normal French dish for receiving SKY."

I bought a dish that was (?)fibreglass and supposedly 30% more powerful than the equivalent in steel. I wonder if this is the difference?

[Nick Trollope]

[quote]>"The SKY 60 cm dish is about equivalent to a 80 cm normal French dish for receiving SKY." I bought a dish that was (?)fibreglass and supposedly 30% more powerful than the equivalent in steel. I ...[/quote]

I doubt if your dish is fibreglass, as all dishes work by reflecting and concentrating the signals from the satellite. They have to be metal, or metal coated. In reality, there is not much difference in the metals used (almost inevitabley aluminium).

The bigger the dish, the larger the parabola that it can contain and the higher the gain (or strength of signal received), which is why Goonhilly dishes are about 120' across (or whatever).

Except for the very south, a "standard" sky dish will work throughout France. If it does not, then the problem lies elsewhere.

[Hegs]

Nick,

"Antenne de 85 cm en fibre de verre" - the last one on the page, Fibre 85. http://www.bctech.fr/satellite/satpara1.html

It also looks and feels like fibreglass. And works very well in storms and heavy rain!