SatcoDX - TELE-satellite International Magazine

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SNAI’s main office can
be found in Lucca not too
far from Pisa, Italy.
include a 3.8-meter mesh antenna and
a 3.0-meter solid dish. “But that’s all in
the past”, winked Mario, “today there are
other problems to solve.”
His experiences as a DXer, where he
always had to find practical solutions
using the simplest methods, help him
today to solve much more complex signal
processing problems. He gave us an
example, “In our own office system we
need to not only have access to HOTBIRD
but also naturally our own transponder at
16 east.” He acquired a narrow LNB, one
that he could mount at a 3 deg offset,
and fiddled with a single-cable solution
so that only one single cable was needed
to receive both HOTBIRD and the SNAI-
TV transponder at 16 east.
But there are also more complex systems
in the works. “We are in the process
of converting our system to HD.”
Even though the transmissions directly
from the racing venues are still in SD,
Mario came up with his own idea to make
it work: he scales the incoming SD signal
up to HD and can then transmit the programs
in MPEG4 with an 8 MB bandwidth.
It’s easy to see that Mario has satellite
technology in his blood. He can tell based
on the reception signal what encoder is
being used. “One encoder manufacturer
doesn’t have a complete grasp of their
technology; you can easily see this”,
comments Mario.
We asked him as a professional what
direction he thought that HDTV would
continue to go. For Europe he referred to
the state-run as well as the public channels:
“they have to lead the way; private
channels don’t normally take the initiative.”
A horror to him is the HD programming
from their national PayTV provider Sky:
“They scale everything up. This can be
www.TELE-satellite.com — 10-11/2008 — TELE-satellite & Broadband
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