Optus D1 satellite - up and running?

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Aloha

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Topic # 9818 15-Oct-2006 22:23

I read in the newspaper last Friday that the new Optus D1 satellite launch is planned on 14th of October, Saturday.
Today is Sunday, did it reach the orbit? If yes, will we experience better picture quality soon from Sky?

What do you know about it?

I is a kollege stoodent. Bee nice.

Aloha

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Reply # 48748 15-Oct-2006 22:28

Ohh I just found this

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&ObjectID=10405878

I is a kollege stoodent. Bee nice.

Bung

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Reply # 48750 15-Oct-2006 22:36

Arianespace have confirmed that the launch went OK. Next step is for Optus to find out if the satellite still works.

mike

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Reply # 48752 15-Oct-2006 22:54

Mission Update and plenty of articles on Google News.

What I found amazing was how many satellites DirecTV (US satellite TV) has in orbit, the latest twice the size of Optus D1. Picture quality/content here has a long way to go to get near the 150 HD satellite channels in the states.

SilentOne

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Reply # 48753 15-Oct-2006 23:08

If the NZ Heralds article is anything to go by (insert snide comment), then we are looking at 2008 before we even begin the first step towards HDTV :/

I'm hanging out for it, having a TV that can handle HDTV, yet watching the best picture sky digi can offer is a little heart renching at times.

sbiddle

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Reply # 48758 16-Oct-2006 06:50

I believe the cutover is going to happen around mid November and should probably result in an outage of up to 5 hrs max.

cyril7

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Reply # 48762 16-Oct-2006 08:23

should probably result in an outage of up to 5 hrs max

Doubt you would see a complete outage. When Foxtel swapped B3 out for C1 a couple of years ago there was hardly a blip. One by One each transponder was cut over (thats two muxs at a time). As there are currently 8 muxs (4tranponders) there is a 25% chance that the channel you are watching drops off for the few minutes it takes to cut over.

I presume they have a sequence where they pull the power on the uplink of each pair they are cutting over, then shut the B1 transponder (on the satellite) down and power on the D1 transponder, then bring the power up and level off.

Its more likely that the whole procedure will take 5hours, and during that time you may see a 10-15min outage on the any 16 or so programs at a time as they are cut over. I guess it will happen in the wee hours so most of us will never know.

Cyril