COULD THE 5G REPACK ADVERSELY EFFECT FALL SUN OUTAGES?
Fall sun outages may affect your satellite broadcast beginning next month — October 3rd —in the southern part of the US, eventually wrapping up by October 12th in the north.
The outages occur within a few days of both the spring and fall equinox, when the sun lines up almost perfectly behind the desired satellite as viewed from the earth station. Typically these disturbances last only a few minutes per day for a few days.
We’ve been asked if the C-band 5G repack will affect downtime in the fall solar outage. Our thoughts? Though the repack has made transponders more crowded, it’s doubtful that it will negatively affect the time for receivers to re-acquire the satellite signal for more than a few seconds.
In our favor? The new geostationary satellites. They’re so powerful that we typically see little to no outage on the larger satellite carriers. If there is any variation due to 5G interference, the higher noise floor is likely to only increase the outage by a few seconds.
Not that we can say the robustness in the new satellites means your network will not be affected by sun outages, or an increase in the noise floor. Sun outages are something everyone must be prepared for, bur particularly those of who you are operating an older Comstream system.
To calculate your specific sun outage times, go to our website’s resources page (https://linkupcommunications.com/resources/) for a link to a sun outage calculator.
A note of caution: if you lose lock for more than a couple of minutes and for several days, you should check your antenna to ensure it’s properly aligned and undamaged.