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 the school ?

The globe in geography lessons? It always stands at an angle in the holder, because:

The Earth’s axis is tilted by 23.44 degrees from the vertical line to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
This inclination constantly changes slightly and fluctuates between about 22.1 degrees and 24.5 degrees.

So our earth moves around the sun with an elliptical trajectory.

This inclination, for example, is responsible for ebb and flow.

In winter (21.12.- 20.03.): It gets dark earlier and light later, because the sun’s radiation changes daily due to the rotation around the earth.

The sun always has the same distance to 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 the “Astra 19.2 E”.
This satellite has a fixed angular position with which it rotates around the earth & thus we can receive the transmitters relatively easily.

As with the sun, the beam angle changes and (in winter) no longer hits the illumination zones exactly.

The signals for the individual TV channels are bundled and captured via the LNB’s (this 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…

Since the earth is constantly in motion, the transmitters on the edge of the broadcasting zones (which include Spain and Portugal) fail at different times, in Germany almost never.

At the turn of the year, for example, ARD is cancelled here in Torrox around 8:00 p.m. – for a few minutes.

Times are constantly shifting. At some point you miss the end of the crime scene – annoying.

With the third programs, it can happen that they are not disturbed until around 10:00 p.m., but longer.
After one or two hours everything is ok again.

Spread over the winter, almost all transmitters have reception difficulties at different times!

So: The receivers are not broken – it makes no sense to call a technician.

Of course, you could start a complete channel search in case of transmitter interference. He then adjusts the channels found, the other channels then only fail at different times.

The motorhome owners are happy with their automatically readjusting satellite dishes.

If the TV picture wobbles, it jerks briefly & the dish has recaptured the channel that was just tuned in.

You can imagine it like it used to be with the car radio. When you left the transmission area, the radio signal became weaker and weaker, interference occurred and you could readjust because each station could be received on several frequencies.

It’s the same with the SAT receivers – only that here a channel search is a bit more time-consuming.

Phew – long text, but I can’t explain it better – the problem with TV reception – in winter – in Torrox :-)