November Required Monthly Test

Another successful test of Alaska's EAS on ARCS was carried out on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 1531 AST. The test in this recording was viewed at the APBI offices in Anchorage using a 3.0 meter Cband dish and a Scientific Atlanta D9223 receiver. The ARCS program service is part of a multiplex which includes several other video and audio sources. In the video you can see ARCS is in the upper left corner of the multi-monitor. Watch the colors as they fly through the air.




In the background audio you can hear a second set of tones and data bursts. That is coming from the Sage ENDEC at the other end of the room as it responded to the test.

Sun Outages to Affect ARCSTV Services in October

Beginning Wednesday, October 7th, at approximately 12:50 P.M., all ARCS satellite dish antennas, as well as any dish aimed at SES Americom's AMC-8 spacecraft (aka: Aurora III) will experience brief interruptions in service known as "sun outages". They will happen between 12:50 and 1:10 P.M. daily through Tuesday, October 20th.



All services inside our multiplex on transponder 18 will be affected, including ARCS, Alaska One, UATV, and the associated audio channels. Also affected will be the SCPC radio channels on transponder 24.



These twice-yearly outages occur when the sun and the satellite we look at are aligned for a few minutes each day over the course of two weeks. They are not caused by sun spots.



If you would like to calculate more precise calculations for your particular location and dish size, visit the SES Americom site and use the Sun Outage Tool.



Questions? Comments? Use the comment link below.

Saint Paul Island Gets New Satellite Antenna

The long running project to replace both the Radio SIP and ARCS satellite dishes in Saint Paul with a single shared use dish has come to completion. As of September 15th the new dish began serving both roles, providing KUHB Radio with feeds for APRN and other SCPC satellite channels, as well as providing the community with their ARCS television feed.

Planning for the project began two years ago when it became obvious to APBI and KUHB managers that both dishes were experiencing dropout and increasing rates of failure due to extreme corrosion brought about by the severe environment in which the dishes exist. Since both dishes look at the same satellite, and both ARCS and KUHB radio are located in the same building in Saint Paul, a partnership was proposed that would split the cost of replacement and share the use of the dish. Further savings were realized when the decision was made to use the existing ARCS dish gabion mount, which appeared to be in good condition.

ARCS used Denali Commission funding to purchase and transport the dish to Saint Paul Island. KUHB used a combination of Rasmusson Foundation Grant funds and its own sweat equity to finance and oversee the construction of the new dish which included bringing a contractor to the island to perform the installation work.

As a result, the community received a valuable communications tool that serves both the local public radio mission as well as the community’s ARCS television service, both of which also include Emergency Alert System notifications which run across both APRN and ARCS networks.
The old dishes can be seen in their final days when they were completely failing as satellite receive antennas.

The Amber Alert Test ran across Alaska today. Here is a video shot live of the monitor in APBI's offices as the alert was received over the ARCS satellite channel. There are 6 video displays shown on the monitor; ARCS is the upper left hand display, where you can see the crawl across the top, and the audio present on the leftmost audio meters.

The ARCS display is fed with a DVB MPEG2 PowerVu satellite receiver connected to a 3.0 meter Cband satellite dish on our roof. The receiver is tuned to the multiplex on AMC8, transponder 18. The audio is mono, available on both left and right channels. We have a Sage EnDec in the office for monitoring purposes, which we keep it connected to a dedicated receiver locked to the ARCS channel. The L-1 audio is connected to the Sage audio input #1.

Below is an image of the tape generated from the test. You can see that it received and then sent out the complete message (note that this unit does is not connected to a broadcast station, it is only used for testing and observation). As you can see, ARCS carried the complete test from start to finish with no drop outs.

If your station experienced a problem, please check your connections, your EnDec filters and programming, the clock on your EnDec, and if all else fails, contact me and we can try to help resolve the issue.

June Required Monthly Test

Here is the video taken in our office. ARCS is the upper left monitor.