No SAT reception in Torrox | The winter problem

Is my satellite receiver defective?

Yesterday ARD still worked – today it doesn’t!

What’s going on?

Here on the Spanish coast, it’s a “winter problem”:
It’s not the weather or the temperatures that are to blame, but the tilt angle of our planet.

Let’s see if I can express myself easily:

We remember school ? The globe in geography lessons? It always stands at an angle in its holder, because: The Earth’s axis is inclined by 23.44 degrees to the vertical line of the Earth’s orbit around the sun.
This inclination is constantly changing slightly and fluctuates between around 22.1 degrees and 24.5 degrees. Our Earth therefore moves around the sun in an elliptical orbit. This inclination is responsible for ebb and flow, for example. In winter (21.12.- 20.03.): It gets dark earlier & light later because the solar radiation changes daily due to the rotation around the earth. The sun is always the same distance from the earth – the rotation only changes our “sun reception angle” – the reception of the sun’s rays becomes weaker – so it gets cooler! We receive all our German channels here via “Astra 19.2 E”.
This satellite has a fixed angular position with which it rotates around the earth & so we can receive the channels relatively easily. As with the sun, the radiation angle changes and (in winter) no longer hits the exact illumination zones. The signals for the individual TV channels are bundled and captured via the LNBs (the small box in front of the satellite dish). Signals at the edge of an illumination zone are more susceptible to interference such as fog, rain, thunderstorms… As the earth is constantly in motion, the transmitters at the edge of the broadcasting zones (including Spain & Portugal) fail at different times, in Germany almost never. At the turn of the year here in Torrox, for example, ARD goes off air at around 20:00 – for a few minutes. The times are constantly changing. At some point you miss the end of Tatort – annoying. With the third channels, it can happen that they are only disrupted around 10 p.m., but for longer.
After one or two hours, everything is fine again. Throughout the winter, almost all channels have reception problems at different times! So: The recievers are not broken – there is no point in calling a technician. You could, of course, start a complete channel search in the event of interference. It then adjusts the stations it finds, and the other stations just drop out at different times. Motorhome owners are lucky with their automatically readjusting satellite dishes. If the TV picture wobbles, it jerks briefly & the dish has caught the station that has just been tuned in again. You can imagine it like the car radio used to be. When you left the transmission area, the radio signal became weaker and weaker, interference occurred and you had to retune because each station could be received on several frequencies. It’s the same with SAT receivers – except that a station search is a bit more complicated here. Phew – long text, but I can’t explain it any better – the problem with TV reception – in winter – in Torrox :-)