If you are having trouble listening to Kansas Public Radio, or KPR-2, on one of our repeater station frequencies, we've got the inside scoop. Here's the memo the staff received from the KPR Engineering Department.
In case you receive calls from listeners to our repeater stations or KPR2 listeners who depend on satellite programming more heavily:
The Sun is at it again....
03-Mar-2015 12:48 4 minutes
04-Mar-2015 12:46 6 minutes
05-Mar-2015 12:46 6 minutes
06-Mar-2015 12:47 5 minutes
Satellite-based communication is affected by sun interference which is caused by the sun passing directly behind a geostationary satellite as seen from a receiving earth station. Depending on the receiver’s antenna size, its efficiency and the frequency band used, this interference can cause degradation in quality of service or a complete service outage.
For several minutes each day for several days during the equinox season (February/March and September/October), the sun passes through the equatorial plane which is used by geostationary satellites. At these times, the apparent path of the sun across the sky takes it directly behind the satellite making it appear in the beam width of a receiver earth station's line-of-sight. ####
It's been said that broadcast engineers speak a different language - one uniquely their own. If you understand all this, then perhaps you too could do well in the exciting and glamorous field of broadcasting engineering! And on a very serious note, KPR's engineers are quite excellent, even if the rest of the staff doesn't understand exactly what they're doing or what they mean when they tell us how they're doing it. : - )
