How Satellite TV Works
When satellite television first hit the market, home dishes were expensive metal units that took up a huge chunk of yard space. In these early years, only the most die-hard TV fans would go through all the hassle and expense of putting in their own dish. Satellite TV was a lot more difficult than broadcast and cable TV.
Today, you see compact satellite dishes perched on rooftops all over the United States. Drive through rural areas beyond the reach of the cable companies and you'll find dishes on just about every house. The major satellite television companies are bringing in more customers every day with the lure of movies, sporting events and news from around the world.
The Broadcast TV Problem
Conceptually, satellite television is a lot like broadcast television. It's a wireless system for delivering television programming directly to a viewer's house. Both broadcast television and satellite stations transmit programming via a radio signal (see How Radio Works for information about radio broadcasting).
Broadcast stations use a powerful antenna to transmit radio waves to the surrounding area. Viewers can pick up the signal with a much smaller antenna. The main limitation of broadcast television is range. The radio signals used to broadcast television shoot out from the broadcast antenna in a straight line. In order to receive these signals, you have to be in the direct "line of sight" of the antenna. Small obstacles like trees or small buildings aren't a problem; but a big obstacle, such as the Earth, will reflect these radio waves.
If the Earth were perfectly flat, you could pick up broadcast television thousands of miles from the source. But because the planet is curved, it eventually breaks the signal's line of site. The other problem with broadcast television is that the signal is often distorted even in the viewing area. To get a perfectly clear signal like you find on cable, you have to be pretty close to the broadcast antenna without too many obstacles in the way.
The Satellite TV Solution
Satellite television solves the problems of range and distortion by transmitting broadcast signals from satellites orbiting the Earth. Since satellites are high in the sky, there are a lot more customers in the line of site. Satellite television systems transmit and receive radio signals using specialized antennas called satellite dishes.
Satellites are higher in the sky than TV antennas, so they have a much larger "line of sight" range.
The television satellites are all in geosynchronous orbit, meaning that they stay in one place in the sky relative to the Earth. Each satellite is launched into space at about 7,000 mph (11,000 kph), reaching approximately 22,200 miles (35,700 km) above the Earth. At this speed and altitude, the satellite will revolve around the planet once every 24 hours -- the same period of time it takes the Earth to make one full rotation. In other words, the satellite keeps pace with our moving planet exactly. This way, you only have to direct the dish at the satellite once, and from then on it picks up the signal without adjustment, at least when everything works right. (See How Satellites Work for more information on satellite orbits.)
At the core, this is all there is to satellite television. But as we'll see in the next section, there are several important steps between the original programming source and your television.
The Overall System
Early satellite TV viewers were explorers of sorts. They used their expensive dishes to discover unique programming that wasn't necessarily intended for mass audiences. The dish and receiving equipment gave viewers the tools to pick up foreign stations, live feeds between different broadcast stations, NASA activities and a lot of other stuff transmitted using satellites.
Some satellite owners still seek out this sort of programming on their own, but today, most satellite TV customers get their programming through a direct broadcast satellite (DBS) provider, such as DirecTV or the Dish Network. The provider selects programs and broadcasts them to subscribers as a set package. Basically, the provider's goal is to bring dozens or even hundreds of channels to your television in a form that approximates the competition, cable TV. Unlike earlier programming, the provider's broadcast is completely digital, which means it has much better picture and sound quality (see How Digital Television Works for details). Early satellite television was broadcast in C-band radio -- radio in the 3.4-gigahertz (GHz) to 7-GHz frequency range. Digital broadcast satellite transmits programming in the Ku frequency range (12 GHz to 14 GHz ).
There are five major components involved in a direct to home (DTH) satellite system: the programming source, the broadcast center, the satellite, the satellite dish and the receiver. on the next page, we'll look at each component in more detail.
The Components
Programming sources are simply the channels that provide programming for broadcast. The provider doesn't create original programming itself; it pays other companies (HBO, for example, or ESPN) for the right to broadcast their content via satellite. In this way, the provider is kind of like a broker between you and the actual programming sources. (Cable television companies work on the same principle.)
The broadcast center is the central hub of the system. At the broadcast center, the television provider receives signals from various programming sources and beams a broadcast signal to satellites in geostationary orbit.
The satellites receive the signals from the broadcast station and rebroadcast them to the ground.
The viewer's dish picks up the signal from the satellite (or multiple satellites in the same part of the sky) and passes it on to the receiver in the viewer's house.
The receiver processes the signal and passes it on to a standard television.
In the next few sections, we'll look at each step in the process in greater detail.
The Programming
Satellite TV providers get programming from two major sources: national turnaround channels (such as HBO, ESPN and CNN) and various local channels (the NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS and Fox affiliates in a particular area). Most of the turnaround channels also provide programming for cable television, and the local channels typically broadcast their programming over the airwaves.
Turnaround channels usually have a distribution center that beams their programming to a geostationary satellite. The broadcast center uses large satellite dishes to pick up these analog and digital signals from several sources.
Most local stations don't transmit their programming to satellites, so the provider has to get it another way. If the provider includes local programming in a particular area, it will have a small local facility consisting of a few racks of communications equipment. The equipment receives local signals directly from the broadcaster through fiber-optic cable or an antenna and then transmits them to the central broadcast center.
The broadcast center converts all of this programming into a high-quality, uncompressed digital stream. At this point, the stream contains a vast quantity of data -- about 270 megabits per second (Mbps) for each channel. In order to transmit the signal from there, the broadcast center has to compress it. Otherwise, it would be too big for the satellite to handle. In the next section, we'll find out how the signal is compressed.
Compression
The two major providers in the United States use the MPEG-2 compressed video format -- the same format used to store movies on DVDs. With MPEG-2 compression, the provider can reduce the 270-Mbps stream to about 5 or 10 Mbps (depending on the type of programming). This is the crucial step that has made DBS service a success. With digital compression, a typical satellite can transmit about 200 channels. Without digital compression, it can transmit about 30 channels.
At the broadcast center, the high-quality digital stream of video goes through an MPEG-2 encoder, which converts the programming to MPEG-2 video of the correct size and format for the satellite receiver in your house.
The MPEG encoder analyzes each frame and decides how to encode it. The encoder eliminates redundant or irrelevant data, and extrapolates information from other frames to reduce the overall size of the file. Each frame can be encoded in one of three ways:
As an intraframe - An intraframe contains the complete image data for that frame. This method of encoding provides the least compression.
As a predicted frame - A predicted frame contains just enough information to tell the satellite receiver how to display the frame based on the most recently displayed intraframe or predicted frame. This means that the frame contains only the data that relates to how the picture has changed from the previous frame.
As a bidirectional frame - To display a bidirectional frame, the receiver must have the information from the surrounding intraframe or predicted frames. Using data from the closest surrounding frames, the receiver interpolates the position and color of each pixel.
This process occasionally produces "artifacts" -- little glitches in the video image -- but for the most part, it creates a clear, vivid picture.
The rate of compression depends on the nature of the programming. If the encoder is converting a newscast, it can use a lot more predicted frames because most of the scene stays the same from one frame to the next. In other sorts of programming, such as action movies and music videos, things change very quickly from one frame to the next, so the encoder has to create more intraframes. As a result, something like a newscast generally compresses to a much smaller size than something like an action movie.
Encryption and Transmission
After the video is compressed, the provider needs to encrypt it in order to keep people from accessing it for free. Encryption scrambles the digital data in such a way that it can only be decrypted (converted back into usable data) if the receiver has the correct decryption algorithm and security keys. (See How Encryption Works for more information.)
Once the signal is compressed and encrypted, the broadcast center beams it directly to one of its satellites. The satellite picks up the signal with an onboard dish, amplifies the signal and uses a another dish to beam the signal back to Earth, where viewers can pick it up.
In the next section, we'll see what happens when the signal reaches a viewer's house.
The Dish
A satellite dish is just a special kind of antenna designed to focus on a specific broadcast source. The standard dish consists of a parabolic (bowl-shaped) surface and a central feed horn. To transmit a signal, a controller sends it through the horn, and the dish focuses the signal into a relatively narrow beam.
The curved dish reflects energy from the feed horn, generating a narrow beam.
The dish on the receiving end can't transmit information; it can only receive it. The receiving dish works in the exact opposite way of the transmitter. When a beam hits the curved dish, the parabola shape reflects the radio signal inward onto a particular point, just like a concave mirror focuses light onto a particular point.
The curved dish focuses incoming radio waves onto the feed horn.
In this case, the point is the dish's feed horn, which passes the signal onto the receiving equipment. In an ideal setup, there aren't any major obstacles between the satellite and the dish, so the dish receives a clear signal.
In some systems, the dish needs to pick up signals from two or more satellites at the same time. The satellites may be close enough together that a regular dish with a single horn can pick up signals from both. This compromises quality somewhat, because the dish isn't aimed directly at one or more of the satellites. A new dish design uses two or more horns to pick up different satellite signals. As the beams from different satellites hit the curved dish, they reflect at different angles so that one beam hits one of the horns and another beam hits a different horn.
The central element in the feed horn is the low noise blockdown converter, or LNB. The LNB amplifies the radio signal bouncing off the dish and filters out the noise (radio signals not carrying programming). The LNB passes the amplified, filtered signal to the satellite receiver inside the viewer's house.
The Receiver
The end component in the entire satellite TV system is the receiver. The receiver has four essential jobs:
It de-scrambles the encrypted signal. In order to unlock the signal, the receiver needs the proper decoder chip for that programming package. The provider can communicate with the chip, via the satellite signal, to make necessary adjustments to its decoding programs. The provider may occasionally send signals that disrupt illegal de-scramblers, as an electronic counter measure (ECM) against illegal users.
It takes the digital MPEG-2 signal and converts it into an analog format that a standard television can recognize. In the United States, receivers convert the digital signal to the analog NTSC format. Some dish and receiver setups can also output an HDTV signal.
It extracts the individual channels from the larger satellite signal. When you change the channel on the receiver, it sends just the signal for that channel to your TV. Since the receiver spits out only one channel at a time, you can't tape one program and watch another. You also can't watch two different programs on two TVs hooked up to the same receiver. In order to do these things, which are standard on conventional cable, you need to buy an additional receiver.
It keeps track of pay-per-view programs and periodically phones a computer at the provider's headquarters to communicate billing information.
Receivers have a number of other features as well. They pick up a programming schedule signal from the provider and present this information in an onscreen programming guide. Many receivers have parental lock-out options, and some have built-in digital video recorders (DVRs), which let you pause live television or record it on a hard drive.
While digital broadcast satellite service is still lacking some of the basic features of conventional cable (the ability to easily split signals between different TVs and VCRs, for example), its high-quality picture, varied programming selection and extended service areas make it a good alternative for some. With the rise of digital cable, which also has improved picture quality and extended channel selection, the TV war is really heating up. Just about anything could happen in the next 10 years as all of these television providers battle it out.
