All About Satellite Television

I remember when satellite television was first introduced, the dishes were about as tall as a one story house, and they were pretty high maintenance. Not only were these behemoths expensive, from what I recall, they were uglier than sin and only the most die hard television lovers had them. Pretty different from what you see today isn’t it? Technology has gone so far as to enable us to fit these dishes on top of the roofs of our homes.

In concept satellite works just like its competitor, cable television. They are both wireless systems used to broadcast radio signals to your home and onto your television screen. Yet satellite has solved many, if not all of the flaws that cable television has. The problem with cable television is that the area in which you receive your signals from is on the ground, whereas with satellite, you’re getting them from above. Tree’s and such aren’t a problem for cable broadcasting, but the earth’s curvature is. Although it isn’t visible to us, and it appears to be flat, we know the earth curves, which is a big problem for cable as it cannot go any further once it reaches a certain point.

Satellite television has a solution for this, they launch their satellites high enough in the air so that the earth’s curvature isn’t a problem, and the satellite is placed at a specific point in space so that it rotates in sync with the earth. This means that if done correctly, you should only have to position your dish once to point it at the satellite because it is essentially the same distance and position to your house.

Satellite can also go where cable can not, when you get into a mountainous region you will see that every home, or most every home, has a dish mounted upon their roofs. This is because cable companies can’t get their signal though the mountains.

There are five major components in a Direct to Home AKA DTH satellite system. There is the programming source, which is simply the network that provides the programming for the broadcast, they will then send the information to the broadcast center. The broadcast center is the center of operations for the system, they receive all of the programming and send a broadcast signal to the satellites in geostationary orbit. The satellites then receive the information and rebroadcast them down to earth. The subscribers dish will pick up these signals and send them to the receiver which descrambles the signal, then it takes the digital MPEG-2 format signal and converts it into an analog format so that your television can recognize the signal and it is then displayed upon your television screen.

Technology has advanced very far since satellite was first released, so satellite television has become even more mainstream and is widely used because it is often less expensive than cable television, and normally has a wider array of channels and features than cable television does.

By: David Johnson

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Written by David Johnson. Find more information on the latest Dish Network Deal as well as Dish Network Programming Deal