"Richard L." wrote in message
...
In message
"Brenda Ann Dyer" wrote:

Our AFN-TV satellite dish looks pretty much at the horizon to see the
bird
they use here. Under normal circumstances, we get a good solid signal
with
a level of about 89 and a quality of 9 or 10. When it rains hard, that
can
drop to 60 and 3 or 4.. and sometimes it goes out completely. It's funny
sometimes that there can be no rain here locally, but raining hard in
the
distance between the dish and the bird, and we'll lose the signal
completely.

If the satellite is right down on the horizon, that comes more
into the category of DX than normal broadcast reception, which is
what most satellite users are interested in. If somebody parks a
pantechnicon or erects a tower crane, or a tree comes into leaf
anywhere in the next ten miles in your line of sight, then you'll
probably lose your signal for that reason too. Nevertheless, you
could undoubtedly improve your chances with the rain if you had a
larger dish.


Of that I have no doubt.. I was one of the first to install C band dishes,
and where I was in Oregon, a 5 meter dish was really needed for good signal
level (at the time 120 degree LNA's were the norm, and no downconverting,
the 4 GHz signal came right from the dish to the receiver). Some of the
customers didn't want to spend the money on the 5 meter dish, and opted for
a 4 meter one.. then tended to complain about sparklies in the picture..

Here, of course, we are limited. We can use the dish provided by the
satellite service provider (in this case, AFN/AAFES), and that's it.
Satellite TV has only recently been allowed at all in Korea, and AFN
satellite service has only been brought in in the past year or so. The
Korean satellite provider, SkyLife (seemingly a divison of Hong Kong based
Star System) is higher in the sky, and therefor easier to receive with the
same size dish (Ku band, ~0.5 meter)