Satellites Exposed

Do you remember the old satellite antennas? When satellite television was just beginning to evolve, those old antennas were very expensive. They also took up a lot of space in your yard or on your roof. They were gigantic pieces of metal. Most folks had to install everything by themselves in the pioneer days of satellite television. Satellite television was much more difficult to install and set up than cable or broadcast.

Have you looked around lately? I bet you will be able to see a small sized satellite dish on almost half of the rooftops in the United States and Canada. In fact, rural areas cannot even have cable television due to the distance of wiring involved. Rural areas are for the most part, 100% satellite television hotspots. Not too mention the fact that satellite TV companies have people signing up by the hundreds if not thousands each and every day.

All of the ideas for television are the same. Satellite TV is very similar to cable and broadcast in the respect of sending out a signal to a receiving end. Satellite is a wireless system for the most part, which delivers the signal directly to the dish, or your house for that matter. Satellite and broadcast use a programming transmit signal by radio signal.

Normal stations for broadcast use very powerful antennas to transmit their radio waves to the target area. Customers and viewers alike pick up this signal with a small receiving antenna. There is one difference however and that is range. The limitation on broadcast is range. To receive a proper signal you need to be in the exact direction of the broadcast antenna. We run into problems however since the Earth is round.

If Earth was completely flat, we could pick up the broadcast signal from thousands of miles away. However, Earth is curved and this brings about a problem. The signal becomes broken upon reaching a certain part of the Earth’s curve and thus the signal is lost. Viewing can even be distorted in the given “viewing area”. The best picture for this type of service would be a home close to the source signal without too many obstructions in the way.

Satellite TV saves the day here. The range and distortion problem is easily fixed by sending signals from a satellite orbiting the Earth’s surface. Do you know how? It is rather simple. The higher up you go the more surface area you can cover on a “direct line of sight”. Using antennas and dishes, satellite TV service can offer a lot more.

Satellites do not just float anywhere in space though. They stay within the gravitational force of Earth and have a “fixed” position, relative to Earth. The satellites that give us our television are an extremely long way out. They are roughly thirty six thousand miles above the Earth. It is only 100 miles to outer space. With this being said, satellites revolve around the Earth once a day just like Earth does. That is why you only need to point your satellite dish in a certain direction one time. It always picks up the signal.