[time-nuts] Sun Outage

Andrew Rodland andrew at cleverdomain.org
Thu Oct 9 18:12:58 UTC 2014


You pick up satellite TV with a parabolic dish that points at one spot
in the sky where the geostationary satellite lives. A sun outage
happens when the sun wanders into the focus and overloads the receiver
with noise that drowns out the satellite signal (at least, it raises
the noise floor enough that you can't receive the high bitrates needed
for a TV picture).

You pick up GPS with a whole-sky antenna that receives signals from
the constantly-moving swarm of GPS satellites. It undoubtedly receives
some noise from the sun, but the only factor in how much of that you
get is the sun's elevation above the horizon. It's not really relevant
whether the sun is "aligned with a satellite" or not. Even if it was,
the satellite would be somewhere else a minute later. :)

Andrew

On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Bob Stewart <bob at evoria.net> wrote:
> Two days this week, there was a 3 or 4 minute outage on DirecTV as the sun aligned with the satellite and my dish.  So I was wondering what kind of effect this has on the GPS system and especially timing receivers.
>
>
> Bob - AE6RV
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