How does satellite TV work? There is a long version that is very scientific and a shorter version that is more interesting. We’ll stick with the shorter version. The very first satellite for TV was shot into orbit in’62. So, there has been a lot of advances made to the technology behind satellites since then. And, we have benefited from all of those advances.
When it all started there were not a lot of satellites up and most people who wanted to get satellite television had huge gray satellite dishes planted in their back yards. There are still some of these around. They are usually about nine feet in diameter and when somebody wants to move the dish to get a different country’s programs it is a group effort. They originally came with remote controls, but those were lost several years ago so the dish gets turned manually.
The really great thing about these dishes, besides the fact that it was a great excuse not to mow half the back yard, was that you could get programs from other countries. For instance, someone in California could get programming from Canada. Or, when the satellites shifted you could get programs from other countries depending on which satellite you landed on.
So, as the popularity of satellite televisions grew they started shooting more satellites up that had transponders on them. They called these geostationary satellites because they are orbiting at the same speed as the earth so they aren’t really moving anymore than we are. This made reception easier to achieve and if you knew where a satellite was you could point the nine foot dish at the satellite and watch a different countries stuff. It was still pretty cool.
Next, the providers came up with a way for city dwellers who didn’t have nine extra feet in their back yard to use the dishes. The little’” dishes were introduced and as long as a person was pointing it south and it was unobstructed, they got the same great television that the big dish people got. The dish fit anywhere on the building and could be propped up in worse case scenario and still work.
In cities however, obstruction was a problem and that is how “spot beams” were born. The satellites beam a signal to the spot beam, that beams a signal to the dish, that beams a signal to the receiver. This solved the problem of getting a signal just about anywhere in a metropolitan area easily.
Because the whole satellite system runs on radio signals, the satellite guys found that it saved a lot of space if they encoded the signals digitally and shot all the channels across the same bandwidth. They now have signals available in both standard and HDTV format going out twenty four hours a day.
So there you have it. The very unscientific answer to the question how does satellite TV work.
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