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European Satellite Changes

Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2011 5:40 am
by silid
Apparently some changes occurred last week that affect European satellite receivers using a universal LNB. STSs have been asked to check that our systems are still working.

Can anyone shed any light on what has actually changed? The UK&I satellite help desk can't answer the question.

Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2011 9:59 am
by StevePoulsen
silid wrote:Apparently some changes occurred last week that affect European satellite receivers using a universal LNB. STSs have been asked to check that our systems are still working.

Can anyone shed any light on what has actually changed? The UK&I satellite help desk can't answer the question.

The video encoders at the conference center were changed out. While in theory this should not have affected anything. But as everyone knows a theory is just a theory until it’s proven. So a request was sent to check receive locations worldwide, not just in Europe to verify that the new encoders would work.

Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2011 2:01 pm
by silid
Thanks for that. It makes sense why they would ask us to check it still works. I think the LNB business is a red herring.

Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2011 5:17 am
by Biggles
Not exactly a red herring. We had our satellite contractors in to sort out an unrelated problem, on Wednesday. They had been going round various meeting houses for no reception problems and discovered that the software changes carried out, had altered some of the parameters relating to the LNB. If a universal LNB had been fitted, the polarity was then set incorrectly. Hence the reception problems.

Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2011 12:28 pm
by silid
Thanks Biggles. That kind of matches what the support desk said, but I can't believe that changing the video encoders could have an effect on the polarity of the broadcast signal.

Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2011 10:04 am
by StevePoulsen
silid wrote:Thanks Biggles. That kind of matches what the support desk said, but I can't believe that changing the video encoders could have an effect on the polarity of the broadcast signal.
.

They would not. However, Reading original post, I believe that this is actually a result of an earlier change which was made to the receivers some months ago... Some months ago, an issue was discovered with the satellite receivers that caused the audio on Unity 552 receivers to stutter and become un-intelligible (sounded like a bird chirp?) to resolve this issue, a software patch was released which detects when the issue has occurred, and resets the audio buffer. To distribute this patch, a mass update was sent to the receivers over the satellite network. However as part of the update some of the original parameters were wrong and so some receivers lost the signal. Though I believed Headquarters had originally asked for the site to be checked prior to the Christmas devotional, which is why I had assumed that the request was a new one as a result of the Encoder change. Which I suppose it could have still been, but with some communication wires swapped during the process.