Archive news 2007.

 This is the news that was on the front page of the site in 2007. I've moved it here as it was taking up rather a lot of space. 

18th October 2007:    Astra 1E has been lit up at 23.5E. Traffic is slowly being shifted over from 1D

4th October 2007:    Today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1. The Russian satellite  was the very first man made satellite launched. Sputnik 1. Sputnik weighed just over 180 pounds. The 22-inch aluminum sphere, scarcely wider in diameter than a modern home satellite dish, orbited the Earth every 96 minutes and was launched from what is now Baikonur14th September 2007:   

September 16th 2007: The 20th anniversary of the launch of Optus A3 which is currently slotted at 31.5E. She is radiating a few low powered test signals for SES Astra

26th August 2007:    Another new satellite joins the site - Eurobird 9 at 9E. A gloriously sunny morning allowed me to have a look for her. I can report the fta stuff is easily received on a 43cm zone 1 sky mini dish here in southern Scotland :-)

25th August 2007:    Astra 2C fired up with the first blank test carriers at 28E yesterday

19th August 2007:    Astra 1L is in full service at 19E. Astra 2C has been retired from 19E and is on is way to 28E. It should be on station early this week :-) and will go into service in the next few weeks.

13th July 2007:    All change at 19E - Astra 1L has entered service prompting the start of what will be a big shuffle of frequencies amongst the 19E satellites. I will make a start on updating all the charts over the weekend, and changing the details on the 19E chart to reflect the current situation.

5th July 2007:    Astra 1L has successfully completed her tests and is moving around the arc towards 19E. She should be on station by the beginning of next week. :-)
Eurobird 9 is now on air with its first channels - high power levels have been reoprted although because of continuing poor weather here I havent had a chance to swing one of the dishes around a bit and have a look.

10th June 2007:    Astra 1L has been testing at 2E, although no actual channels have been reported - just blank carriers.

17th May 2007:    Hottie 2 has been withdrawn from 13E, relocated to 9E and renamed Eurobird 9. The first active tp is 11785H 27500 5/6 which is on air but currently with no channels. its coming at extremely high power here - 90% quality on one of the old 80 cm dishes! I must admit Im looking forward to this one - the close proximity to 13E means Eutelsat is planning dual feed lnb's and this obviously means they will be putting a reasonable number of channels on it. The first major residents will be a new Portuguese pay tv service which will be testing in the next few weeks

5th May 2007:    24 hours late, but Astra 1L was successfully launched last night on another spectacular Ariane 5 mission - pictures coming soon :-) 
I finally managed to get 1 transponder off Telstar 12 at 15W this afternoon. The relevant table will be added to the site tomorow.

30th April 2007:    Astra 1L will be launched on an Araiane 5 from Kourou on Thursday May 3rd. Coverage will be shown on the Astra Vision 2 channel on 19E (12552V 22000 5/6). The channel is already active carrying an ASTRA testcard if you want to get the channel tuned in. The launch window opens at 2329 UK summer time and closes at about 0015. The feed normally fires up about 20 minutes before launch, so settle down with a beer and enjoy the coverage. :-) If you have never seen a launch I really recommend you make time to watch this one. An SES press release says 1L will release Astra 2C which can then be sent to 28E to ease capacity problems on the UK orbital slot.

28th April 2007:    A gloriously sunny and warm morning here today so I dug one of the spare 80cm dishes out of the hedge and had a look what I could find. Im delighted to report most of the tp's on Badr 4 at 26E are visible at reasonable signal strength, and Ive also picked up some of the high bitrate tp's on Astra 3A at 23E although only channels on the horizontal polarization are visible.

14th March 2007:    Eutelsat have announced that Eurobird 10 (ex Hotbird3) has been shifted from 9E to 4E and put into commercial service as Eurobird 4.

13th March 2007:    Hotbird 2 was turned off overnight after Eutelsat engineers detected an anomaly in on of the power supply sub systems. All traffic was moved over to Hotbird 8 with the same technical parameters.

19th February 2007:    Astra 1C has moved round to 4.6E and is on air at very high power. I can get her easily on my 5E dish. The old Astra 1C (2E) table has been updated to reflect the new situation

4th February 2007:    Ive put the pictures up from the NSS8 launch disaster. After another cold couple of hours in the garden yesterday and I finally tracked down Eurobird 3 at 33E

31st January 2007:    Anyone tuned into the launch coverage of NSS8 on Astra 1D last night would have watched a most spectacular event from the Sea Launch platform in the Pacific. The rocket never got off the launchpad, and blew up on the pad as the coundown got to zero!!  NSS8 was supposed to be going to 57E, although she is now in several million bits at the bottom of the Pacific. There will be some screen grabs of the coverage added over the weekend, along with some info about poor old NSS8. The last minute of the countdown and the explosion can be seen on You Tube although the feed was cut very quickly after the bang....

27th January 2007:    2 new orbital positions join the site! Ive spent a bitterly cold afternoon outside chasing down the European beams of Seasat (36E) and Express AM-1 (40E). I now have details from 20 orbital slots on the site.

7th January 2007:     The website passed the magic 100,000 on the front page counter this morning!!

Archive news for 2005

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