"Dave" wrote in message
...

"Art Unwin" wrote in message
...
Aussiland television was turned off for a short while yesterday.
Statement made that there was a sunburst aproaching the satellites!
They were only off for a short while but it would appear the sunspot
cycle has become alive!

no solar activity... eclipse season maybe? for a short time each spring
and
fall geostationary satellites happen to line up with the sun's path,
stations that have no backup satellite may lose signal when their
satellite
lines up with the sun for a few minutes and the sun's noise blocks the
satellite signal.


Don't know if they still do it, but once upon a time HBO produced a program
guide for their home-sat subscribers. In the issues for April and October
(I think) they'd always advise us about sun outages and give us the
predicted dates, based on our latitude.