A sun outage, also known as a sun spot, is a disruption in satellite communications produced by solar radiation interference. When the sun is in direct line with a communication satellite, the sun’s energy overwhelms the satellite signal, causing interference. As the sun crosses across the horizon, each channel may be affected for 1 to 7 minutes. This is a natural occurrence over which we have no influence, and it affects all satellite channels carried to all video carriers.
When do Sun Outages Occur and how long do they last?
Every Spring and Fall, there are sun outages that might last up to a week. Sun spots appear during daylight hours and are a temporary inconvenience that lasts no longer than ten minutes.
How will it impact your service?
During Sun outages, you may notice brief service interruptions such as sparkles, distorted or fuzzy images, picture freezing, audio distortions, or even channel loss.
Do sunspots have an impact on satellites?
As a result, certain satellites may be damaged or knocked out of service during flares. During flares, telecommunication satellites and even GPS satellites can be rendered useless for extended periods of time. It could potentially have an effect on people, including any humans orbiting the Earth at the time.
Can solar flares interfere with satellite television?
Solar flares and radiation emitted by the sun damage the satellite’s signal and create a momentary signal loss when the sun is aligned with a transmitting satellite.
Do sunspots affect Internet access?
If your TV signal is degrading or disappearing for a few minutes in the evening, the Wikipedia explanation below may help you figure out what’s going on. Because most television programming is broadcast by satellite to send their signal at some time, this situation impacts all television providers. Sun fade is expected to occur between October 5th and October 10th, according to projections.
A sun outage, also known as a sun transit or sun fade, is a disruption or distortion of geostationary satellite signals produced by solar radiation interference. The sun’s energy overwhelms the satellite signal, causing this result.
Sun outages occur before the March equinox (February, March) and after the September equinox (September and October) in the northern hemisphere, and after the March equinox and before the September equinox in the southern hemisphere. The sun’s apparent passage through the sky is precisely behind the line of sight between an earth station and a satellite at these times. Because the sun radiates powerfully across the whole spectrum, including the microwave frequencies used to communicate with satellites (C-band, Ku band, and Ka band), the signal from the satellite is swamped by the sun. A sun outage can cause partial signal degradation (an increase in the error rate) or total signal destruction. From roughly 20 February to 20 April, the influence sweeps north to south, and from around 20 August to 20 October, affecting any single place for fewer than 12 minutes per day for a few days.
What solar events can cause cell phone, satellite, and television reception to be disrupted?
Twice a year, due to weather, you may suffer some television interference “outages caused by the sun.” A phenomenon known as a blackout causes such disruptions “Interference from solar satellites.” When the sun is directly behind a satellite sending cable signals, short outages occur. When the sun aligns with a satellite, solar radiation, a form of energy emitted by the sun, interferes with the satellite’s signal, resulting in a momentary signal loss.
Why are satellites affected by solar storms?
Geomagnetic storms can endanger orbiting satellites that help people on the ground in a variety of ways.
The atmosphere heats up and extends higher as it absorbs energy from magnetic storms. The thermosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that stretches from about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface to roughly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers), sees a large rise in density as a result of this expansion. For satellites, higher density equals more drag, which might be an issue.
This is precisely what caused the SpaceX Starlink satellites to be decommissioned in February. Falcon 9 rockets launch Starlink satellites into a low-altitude orbit, typically between 60 and 120 miles (100 and 200 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface. The satellites then use their onboard engines to gradually overcome drag and rise to their eventual height of around 350 miles (550 km).
While still in extremely low-Earth orbit, the latest set of Starlink satellites met a geomagnetic storm. Their engines were unable to cope with the increasing drag, and the satellites began to plummet toward Earth, finally exploding in the atmosphere.
Space weather poses a number of risks to space-based systems, including drag. During large geomagnetic storms, the number of high-energy electrons in the magnetosphere increases dramatically, which means more electrons will pierce the shielding on a spacecraft and collect within its electronics. This accumulation of electrons can cause harm to devices by causing a minor lightning strike.
Even during minor geomagnetic storms, penetrating radiation or charged particles in the magnetosphere can change the output signal from electronic devices. This phenomena can produce problems in any aspect of a spacecraft’s electronics system, and if a vital component fails, the entire satellite can fail. Small mistakes are prevalent and typically fixable, but total failures do occur, albeit infrequently.
Finally, geomagnetic storms can cause satellites to lose their ability to connect with Earth via radio waves. Radio waves are used in several communications systems, such as GPS. Radio signals are always distorted by the atmosphere to some degree, thus engineers account for this when designing communication systems. Changes in the ionosphere the charged equivalent of the thermosphere that spans nearly the same height range will alter how radio waves travel across it during geomagnetic storms. During geomagnetic storms, the calibrations in place for a peaceful atmosphere become incorrect.
This makes it harder to lock onto GPS signals, for example, and can cause placement to be thrown off by a few meters. GPS location inaccuracies of a few meters are simply not acceptable in many industries, including aviation, maritime, robotics, transportation, agriculture, military, and others. Autonomous driving systems will also necessitate precise location.
What can cause satellites to malfunction?
Collisions or anti-satellite tests in orbit produce some space debris. When two spacecraft crash, hundreds of new fragments are created, resulting in a large amount of new debris. Several countries, including the United States, China, and India, have practiced blowing up their own satellites with missiles.
Is it true that the sun has an impact on antenna reception?
Because of the sun’s position, cable and satellite companies are alerting customers that interruptions are possible. Programming may be interrupted for up to 10 minutes at a time between October 5th and October 19th.
When the satellites that carry television signals from space are in the direct path of the sun twice a year, outages are likely. The sun’s radiation overwhelms the signals, preventing them from reaching satellite dishes on the ground.
Because our signal is delivered over fiberoptic lines, local Channel 13 programming will not be disrupted for Mediacom customers; however, Antenna TV may encounter outages.
Customers with Dish and DirectTV may experience brief signal loss, and satellite radio programs may be disrupted.
Is there any effect from the sun?
When Sunday arrives, you settle down with your family to enjoy one of the most popular weekend activities: watching television. The movie or football game begins, and then the signal on your television abruptly disappears a few minutes later. What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? The vast majority of people try to fix the problem themselves by adjusting wires or restarting equipment, but if nothing works after numerous efforts, you become enraged and decide to call your cable operator to find out what went wrong.
Similar situations may arise in companies that have their operations and production centers in remote locations, such as oil wells or mining fields, and their satellite channels, which they use to monitor and control various variables, begin to experience unexpected service interruptions due to supplier company failures. In both circumstances, though, solar interference may be a factor.
These anomalies are caused by solar radiation, which is produced by a phenomena known as Equinox, interfering with satellite signals. This event occurs twice a year, on March 20-21 and September 22-23, when the north pole and south pole are at the same distance from the sun, causing day and night to have the same duration and signaling the change of season.
Because cable television signals come from satellites in geostationary orbit over the Equator, and because the Sun is behind, when the sun’s rays are directed directly at the lobe of these receiving antennas, arriving in parallel with the signals from the satellites, there are interruptions, weakness in the transmission, and pixelated images in any service, whether video broadcasting, Direct-To-Home, or satellite voice and data channels, there are interruptions, weakness in the transmission, and pixelated images in any service
Solar interference is totally predictable and is dependent on the earth station’s geographical location as well as the satellite’s orbital length, as it only lasts a few minutes during the day. The interruption tends to remain significantly longer with a smaller antenna diameter since the beam has a larger aperture.
The magnitude of the interference angle is a function of the antenna diameter and downlink frequency; the higher the diameter, the narrower the antenna beam, and hence the shorter the interference.
Cable television service providers can monitor decoders on the ground to shorten the period without service when the satellite signal is lost and convey it to its subscribers, according to engineering colleges in countries such as Chile and Argentina. Companies such as TotalPlay in Mexico, for example, have alerted their clients of the service disruption and its cause using the same signal.
Similarly, satellite telecommunications companies advise companies with operations centers in difficult-to-reach areas to always have a backup link that allows them to have two different satellites and affectation timing ranges for better control, not just for this type of phenomenon, but for any eventuality.
With the goal of reducing the impact of solar interference on your operations as much as possible, so you can maintain control over the performance of its variables, AXESS wants your firm to be educated and prepared for this event. As a result, we ask you to familiarize yourself with the calendar in which your service will be affected or influenced in the charts below:
What happens if a satellite gets in the way of the sun and the Earth?
Sun outage season is announced twice a year to our consumers, but what exactly are sun outages and how do they effect transmissions? Claudio Fanciullacci, our Network Management Supervisor, explains.
When the receiving earth station, the satellite, and the sun are all aligned, a sun outage (also known as sun interference or sun fade) occurs. The conjunction of the sun and the satellite is the name given to this situation.
The figure of merit of any receiving antenna is G/T, where G is the antenna gain at the receive frequency and T is the receiving system’s equivalent noise temperature. The greater the G/T rating, the better the link’s performance.
Because the sun is a massive source of radiation, the antenna noise temperature rises during conjunction, lowering the overall G/T and link performance. This interference can degrade the satellite signal and cause a service interruption depending on the size, efficiency, and frequency range employed by the receive antenna.
Interference from the sun lasts several minutes. The location of the receiving earth station, the size of the antenna, the received frequency, and the link margin all influence the actual timing, duration, and severity of service deterioration.
Sun outages for earth stations receiving data from geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellites occur around the equinoxes (February-March and September-October) for around two weeks, when the sun passes through the equatorial plane used by GEO satellites. During these times, the sun crosses the equatorial plane and is directly behind the satellite as seen from the receiving earth station at particular time intervals.
Yes, there are various free online tools that can help you to estimate the duration of expected outages at your area. On their websites, satellite providers usually provide calculators that allow users to estimate interference times in advance.
How can I tell if a power loss in the sun would affect my transmission?
If you plan to use Eurovision Services’ services, you’ll notice a disclaimer in the Eurovision Services summary stating that we’re approaching sun outage season. It is then recommended that you check when the outage for that specific satellite is expected for your antenna and location using online calculators; if the estimated sun outage time overlaps with the service transmission time, it is recommended that you use a different receiving antenna at a different location.
During a transmission, Eurovision Services guarantees that the signal is always on the satellite at nominal power level, but the sun outage is out of our control, and the receiving earth stations will be disrupted during those precise times. Because the sun outage will not effect two geographically distant sites at the same time, one feasible mitigation is to use a receiving backup antenna in a different geographical position.
We can overcome solar interferences because of the geographical redundancy of the Eurovision Global network: we check sun outage times well in advance and prepare our reception according to the calculations.