Spacevidcast HD taken offline by snow
Oh the pains of living in Minnesota. Of course much of the US is blanketed in snow right now, but this is nothing unusual for us. Check out the video of our 8′ C-Band dish, which is what provides everyone with Spacevidcast HD, covered in snow.
Since we installed the dish in spring we had never needed to deal with snow before. With the dish as you see it in the video I had 51% signal, which I thought was pretty good for having the dish covered that much. Alas, 51% is not enough for an image and I ended up with 0% image quality. I spend around 15 minutes shoveling off the dish (and 45 minutes trying to get dry again) to get the signal back up to 95% with 100% image quality. w00t! Of course now NASA is switching satellites on January 16th, which means I’ll need to figure out how to rotate that dish with all the snow. I’ll probably need to give our great friend PSB Satellite a call to help and make sure that who area is clear of as much snow as possible before hand. That won’t be fun because that is super-compacted, super-wet snow.
My grandfather used to have a motorised C-band dish, which could be steered by the sat box remote control to whichever satellite he wanted to watch. When I was little, I always thought that was the coolest thing, and for the longest time didn’t understand why everyone wanted those tiny plastic dishes that just *sat* there pointing in a single direction!
Good luck with the snow…we’ve seen a single snowfall here in Tennessee which amounted to maybe a quarter inch :/
Yeah, C-Band is pretty cool, but alas ours is not motorized, so we’ll have to move it by hand for the AMC-3 switchover. A bit of a PITA for us, but we’re still the only place on the planet you can get live HD streaming of launch events… So in my mind it is well worth it.