Satellites and what is on them
Well as of recently I have had my head in the clouds so to speak. Or better yet above the clouds probing in what is known as the Clark belt of television satellites.
More particularly with the digital ones that are streaming MPEG2 data. My analog equipment is sitting in a pile near the ruins of my hurricane riddled shed.
Anyway, In addition to probing the likes of 500 channels, I decided to start pointing another dish around to see what I could pick up. As a result of this search I managed to snatch up the data stream of the Telstar5 Satellite. For most this would not be much of interesting catch, but personally speaking I love the thrill of pointing an antenna around waiting for a signal beep and then hunting through the addresses of data to find a picture or music.
This satellite had plenty of that.
Now satellites are not just boxes in the sky beaming back one or two signals like they used to be. Quite to the contrary. In this age of instant digital satisfaction, and being able to encode hours of music on something the size of a postage stamp, you can see how easily it would be to get many more channels out of a spot in the sky that used to only carry one.
Each satellite has what is known as a transponder. Think of this as a little transmitter. Some satellites have 21 of these others have many more or few. Each transponder has its own frequency that it works on. Pretty much anything can go over these. Analog TV/radio, or digital. So if you a TV provider you can broadcast either one analog TV channel over a transponder or encode everything into MPEG2 with data addresses and broadcast anywhere from 10 to 50 channels over one transponder.
Its no mystery why everything moved to digital knowing this fact.
So from one of these transponders, you have this enormous stream of data that moves along spewing data down on us like digital rain. Somewhere in this streaming mess there are 10 channels buried. But where.
Well each transponder also has a Symbol rate, which is alot like the baud rate of a modem. If you know this rate then you can find the addresses of each television program on that transponder. The receiver does most of the work.
Anyway on this one satellite on three particular transponders I found a wide variety of programming. It was alot of foreign stations serving, Iran, India, Laos, and Indonesia, and then the rest was all Christian programming. I’m wondering who owns the satellite to have such a mishmash of programming. I would have never thought there would be a Jesus Christ version of MTV out there.
Alot of the foreign stations had secondary audio channels in English which turned out to be pretty cool. My favorite is IRIB from Iran. The TV over there is just weird.
The radio stations they had were equally strange. Quran radio provided nothing but prayer, there was a Canadian AM radio station that used the stream to get onto the radio network running out of Toronto, and a whole other host of middle-eastern radio stations.
If nothing else this little experiment makes me want to put up a bigger dish.
More particularly with the digital ones that are streaming MPEG2 data. My analog equipment is sitting in a pile near the ruins of my hurricane riddled shed.
Anyway, In addition to probing the likes of 500 channels, I decided to start pointing another dish around to see what I could pick up. As a result of this search I managed to snatch up the data stream of the Telstar5 Satellite. For most this would not be much of interesting catch, but personally speaking I love the thrill of pointing an antenna around waiting for a signal beep and then hunting through the addresses of data to find a picture or music.
This satellite had plenty of that.
Now satellites are not just boxes in the sky beaming back one or two signals like they used to be. Quite to the contrary. In this age of instant digital satisfaction, and being able to encode hours of music on something the size of a postage stamp, you can see how easily it would be to get many more channels out of a spot in the sky that used to only carry one.
Each satellite has what is known as a transponder. Think of this as a little transmitter. Some satellites have 21 of these others have many more or few. Each transponder has its own frequency that it works on. Pretty much anything can go over these. Analog TV/radio, or digital. So if you a TV provider you can broadcast either one analog TV channel over a transponder or encode everything into MPEG2 with data addresses and broadcast anywhere from 10 to 50 channels over one transponder.
Its no mystery why everything moved to digital knowing this fact.
So from one of these transponders, you have this enormous stream of data that moves along spewing data down on us like digital rain. Somewhere in this streaming mess there are 10 channels buried. But where.
Well each transponder also has a Symbol rate, which is alot like the baud rate of a modem. If you know this rate then you can find the addresses of each television program on that transponder. The receiver does most of the work.
Anyway on this one satellite on three particular transponders I found a wide variety of programming. It was alot of foreign stations serving, Iran, India, Laos, and Indonesia, and then the rest was all Christian programming. I’m wondering who owns the satellite to have such a mishmash of programming. I would have never thought there would be a Jesus Christ version of MTV out there.
Alot of the foreign stations had secondary audio channels in English which turned out to be pretty cool. My favorite is IRIB from Iran. The TV over there is just weird.
The radio stations they had were equally strange. Quran radio provided nothing but prayer, there was a Canadian AM radio station that used the stream to get onto the radio network running out of Toronto, and a whole other host of middle-eastern radio stations.
If nothing else this little experiment makes me want to put up a bigger dish.