The first service cutover from Asiasat 2 to Asiasat 5 was successfully conducted on September 17 at 22.15 UTC. All services are planned to be transferred by the end of September. Already many viewers are reporting increased signal levels from this new satellite.
Asiasat 5 is a Space systems Loral SSL1300 satellite with 26 C band and 14 Ku band transponders. The C band footprint covers 53 countries from Russia to New Zealand and from Japan to the Middle East and parts of Africa.
This new satellite offers 2 high …

Hot on the heels of Senator Conroy’s announcement last month that there would be no 4th free to air television network for Australia, comes the news that Telstra is believed to be planning the release of a PVR called “T Box” by the end of the year.
According to a news item on the Big Pond News website, this strategy would allow Telstra to offer its own (Big Pond) content, which it already does to Telstra broadband customers, with no bandwidth charges.
It would also place Telstra in direct competition with both …

Japan’s indigenous H-2B rocket successfully launched the HTV cargo transporter on September 11 for a week long voyage to the ISS. The launch vehicle flew smoothly, and at 15 minutes and 6 seconds after liftoff, the separation of the HTV Demonstration Flight was confirmed.The HTV was designed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to transport supplies to the ISS. On this demonstration mission, the HTV is carrying 4.5 tonnes of food and supplies, and was scheduled to dock with the ISS on September 18. Launched from the JAXA Space …

Palapa D1, owned by Indonesian telco Indosat, suffered a third stage launcher mishap on August 31 during the launch sequence from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Southwest China’s Sichuan province. Consequently the satellite was placed in an unusable orbit.
Failure occurred 20 minutes after liftoff as the third stage was scheduled to ignite for the second burn of the launch. The 13 metre long third stage, powered by two YF-75 liquid hydrogen and oxygen engines capable of generating 35,000 pounds of thrust used on most long March launchers has never failed …

On Monday the 21st of September 2009 Central China Television has re shuffled the CCTV 4, 9, E & F services to a new transponder on Chinasat 6B. This re-shuffle has allowed additional services to be added to this transponder including an Arabic and Russian duplicate service to compliment the existing French and Spanish service on the transponder. The new transponder data is as follows,
Frequency : 4115
Polarisation: Horizontal
FEC: 3/4
Symbol Rate: 21370
This new transponder is much stronger than the previous and will allow reception to be much more reliable for people …

South Korea’s indigenous KSLV-1 launcher lifted off from the Naro Space Centre on August 25, but failed to launch a scientific observation satellite into low Earth orbit.
A previous launch attempt several days earlier was halted when “abnormal data’ was observed during the automated launch sequence.
The launch had been postponed on five previous occasions: — the end of 2007, end of 2008, the second quarter of 2009 and July 30 and August 11, due to Russia’s refusal to transfer technology or problems in acquiring components.
The KSLV-1 launcher is a mix of …

Publicly listed telecommunications firm PT Indonesian Satellite Corporation Tbk (Indosat) is set to launch its second satellite later this month.
Palapa D1 is scheduled to be launched from the Xichang Launch Centre, China on August 31 aboard a Long March 3B launcher.
The satellite, said to have cost US$220 million, was built by Thales Alenia Space and based on their Spacebus 4000B3 platform will carry 35 C band and 5 Ku band transponders.
This satellite has been built without the use of any US made components and this allowed the satellite to be …

Well known Swedish manufacturer  Emitor, recently send us one of their Microlook G2 units for evaluation.
Here’s what we found………..
The first sentence of the User Manual says it all..”This unit is made for exact alignment of satellite dishes” and that is exactly what it delivers. Our experience with Emitor products goes back ten years and we previously reviewed the Satlook Micro several years ago.
Since that time Emitor have striven to improve the product and the G2 represents the pinnacle of that development according to John Lindberg leader of the development team. …

The Autumnal equinox is almost here and solar outages will occur from September 2 to 13.
Easterly satellites such as Inteslat 8 will be affected around 9.00 AEST for periods of up to 15 minutes.
Westerly satellites such as Thaicom 5 will be affected at around 3pm AEST.
To calculate the precise outage time for your location, go the the ionispheric prediction service  on line calculator at:
http://www.ips.gov.au/Satellite/3/1
Satellite systems using auto trackers should have the tracker disabled during periods of solar outage to ensure the dish does not lock to the Sun !!

Optus has announced that due to a court suppression order issued by the Supreme Court of Australia regarding broadcaster coverage of impending proceedings of a particular court case in Victoria, the ABC and any other media organization with national satellite programming coverage, has been forced to restrict the availability of their national service to viewers. What this means, for the duration of the suppression order, is that Aurora viewers will only be able to watch the ABC service applicable to the state in which they reside.