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gwalk
Premium Member
join:2005-07-27
West Mich.

gwalk to C0RR0SIVE88

Premium Member

to C0RR0SIVE88

Re: decomissioning satellite?? true?

"But, there was a satellite lately that is dieing that HN used that was decommissioned and replaced with another, don't think it affects state side residents though"

Several years ago Galaxy 11 @ 91 W. was replaced. It seems the outage lasted only an hour. The positioning was so good my signal strength went up 5 points.

dbirdman
MVM
join:2003-07-07
usa

dbirdman

MVM

said by gwalk:

"But, there was a satellite lately that is dieing that HN used that was decommissioned and replaced with another, don't think it affects state side residents though"

Several years ago Galaxy 11 @ 91 W. was replaced. It seems the outage lasted only an hour. The positioning was so good my signal strength went up 5 points.

The latest was SatMex8 replacing SatMex5. The switchover was completed more than a month ago, and there are no reports of even a minute's worth of downtime. There have been a few glitches since then, but nothing particularly abnormal.

CJensen13: When you checked the cable connections did you actually unscrew them and check them internally? The center copper wire can become corroded. Cable issues are probably number one.

Number two is moisture in the feedhorn, seen as condensation on the "Window."

After that, a dish that has become un-pointed is a common issue. When that happens and the signal gets down into the 40s you will get regular dropouts. Most transponders have no signal between 31 and the low 40s, meaning that when you drop to, say, 42 it goes to 30 and no signal.

What is your satellite/transponder and what is the signal?

You can't change transponders on your own. Period. Hughes can change them without telling you, but that's about it.

gwalk
Premium Member
join:2005-07-27
West Mich.

gwalk

Premium Member

Hi Don,
The first sentence of my post between the quotes was a copy/paste from one of the OPs replies.
There have been several posts in the last few weeks on the Hughes forum simular to the OPs.
My guess is that Hughes is not renewing some of the transponders as the leases expire and try to "upgrade" people .
The quality of the info from India has always been less than reliable.

Cjensen13, my sig. strength is around 72 on a clear day, both here and at the NOC. When it drops to around 45 (as Don indicated) I have the same symptoms as you describe.

dbirdman
MVM
join:2003-07-07
usa

dbirdman

MVM

said by gwalk:

My guess is that Hughes is not renewing some of the transponders as the leases expire and try to "upgrade" people .

The first part of that is not a guess. They have dropped at least a dozen transponders over the past two years. Among the transponders that they still have they have arranged leases for only partial transponders (symbol rates in the 10-15Msps range) on many others.

For the second part, though, that appears to only occur as an up-sell when people call in with problems. Problems that probably have nothing to do with transponder changes in most cases. For transponder changes, people are transparently changed to others on the same satellite.

On the mobile forums we see a lot of problems due to the changed transponders, for two reasons: One is that folks that travel intermittently and have other service at home may be offline when the transfer occurs (there is usually a window of a couple of weeks during which both old and new are available, then the old is gone). That requires running registration in order to get the new assignment, but the problem is non-obvious to most users.

The other problem is with automatic dishes, which have controllers that need to be set to the same parameters as the modem's assignment. Since people don't notice the change they don't change their controller's configuration, and fail to get online at their next stop.

Both cases are at a minimum weekly support issues in mobile forums, because transponder changes are happening pretty often.

We also get mobile customers who don't go through a VAR but have normal household accounts, who call Hughes support when these problems arise and they come back to us wanting to know how to make their new Gen4 (or in the past, 9000) system become mobile. They are often shocked to learn that they can't.