Sun outages due to sun noise - Autumn 2014

Sun noise occurs when the sun goes behind the satellite. Your dish receives both the wanted signals from the satellite plus a far greater amount of radio noise from the sun itself. Your service fails for several minutes.

This occurs in spring and autumn.

It occurs on several consecutive days, lasting for several minutes on each occasion, at about the same time of day.

There are a number of sun outage calculators on the web.  I've been testing one recently at:
https://www.nynex.de/sunoutage/index.html

This calculator allows you to input both the teleport hub location and the location of the remote VSAT site.  The length in minutes of the sun noise period indicated depends on the noise threshold set (which is preset by the programmer) so if you have a system with a significant link margin your actual outage time will be less.  If it is raining at your site when the sun noise occurs your outage time will be longer.

In a two way VSAT system sun noise outages affect both the hub and the remote earth station sites.

Check the dates and times when you should expect a degradation.  Do the program results match your experience ? Watch out over next few weeks.

Best regards, Eric.