Friday, May 14, 2010
This Sounds Impossible, But Read On
3:46 PM | 
Posted by
Billy Ray |
If you have been watching the news lately you might have heard about the wayward satellite. This link takes you to the ABC News report on the matter. It sounds like science fiction, but we are actually beginning to get warnings from some of the programmers about what this might look like at our homes.
The fact is that one of the satellites orbiting the earth, normally used to bounce cable television signals off of for distribution to cable head ends like ours, has stopped responding to commands from the control center. Even worse, it has started wandering around up there and is about to drift in front of another satellite that carries a lot of the programming you watch on our cable system. Yikes! This is likely to result in some interference to the programming carried on that satellite.
The predictions we are getting go like this: beginning on May 23 and lasting until possibly June 7, you may experience tiling, freezing, or total signal loss for periods, from minutes to hours, on many cable channels as the errant satellite comes between the working satellite and our receiving dish here at the EPB. This problem will affect all North American cable systems!
Obviously, the satellite operators are working on contingency plans to make this as painless as possible, but then I hear BP is doing the same thing at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico right now and most of their solutions are not working. I hope the satellite folks have more luck with something 22,000 miles above our heads! At any rate, start thinking about this in the coming weeks. If you see a program fall apart, it could very well be caused by this wandering satellite!
The fact is that one of the satellites orbiting the earth, normally used to bounce cable television signals off of for distribution to cable head ends like ours, has stopped responding to commands from the control center. Even worse, it has started wandering around up there and is about to drift in front of another satellite that carries a lot of the programming you watch on our cable system. Yikes! This is likely to result in some interference to the programming carried on that satellite.
The predictions we are getting go like this: beginning on May 23 and lasting until possibly June 7, you may experience tiling, freezing, or total signal loss for periods, from minutes to hours, on many cable channels as the errant satellite comes between the working satellite and our receiving dish here at the EPB. This problem will affect all North American cable systems!
Obviously, the satellite operators are working on contingency plans to make this as painless as possible, but then I hear BP is doing the same thing at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico right now and most of their solutions are not working. I hope the satellite folks have more luck with something 22,000 miles above our heads! At any rate, start thinking about this in the coming weeks. If you see a program fall apart, it could very well be caused by this wandering satellite!
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