Each year when the sun is crossing the Earth’s equinoxes in the March and September period the sun will move behind a geosynchronous satellite as seen from an antenna on the Earth’s surface. The satellite signal will be overwhelmed by the RF noise radiated by the sun and this could cause the receive signal to degrade or even cause a complete circuit outage.

The times at which these outages might occur can be predicted with the web tool and precautions could be undertaken by the antenna owners.

There are many factors that influence the times and durations of these signal outages, e.g. the antenna-satellite-sun alignment, antenna size, downlink frequency band and the mathematical model used to predict these times. The predictions that are provided by the tool are times when a degraded downlink signal could be noticed, but it doesn’t mean that it will.

The user is asked to select from a menu or enter information as follows:

• Year and Season
• Satellite
• Antenna diameter in meters
• Frequency band
• Site location or nearby city

Note: The results can be saved by selecting the Web Page, HTML only option in the Internet Explorer.

Click here to enter the Sun Outage Prediction tool