SatcoDX - TELE-satellite International Magazine

74 TELE-satellite & Broadband — 10-11/2008 — www.TELE-satellite.com
▲ A look inside the video room. Here the programming
clips are put together, sent terrestrially
by microwave link to SNAI headquarters in
Rome, then back again and then uplinked to the
satellite at 16 east.
seen by the customer who then opts away
from HD.”
He does see HDTV coming in the future
but not as fast as originally hoped. He
calculates that the savings that DVB-S2
and MPEG4 bring with it don’t compensate
for the extra costs customers would
need to pay for new receivers.
His arguments for the new fiber optic
LNBs from Global Invacom that TELEsatellite
recently introduced are similar:
“Fiber optic technology is coming; it is
beginning to develop in this direction”,
observes Mario, but he is also skeptical
about seeing this in the near future.
Before we left, Mario gave us a hot tip
for DXers: “Most feeds today are transmitted
in 8PSK – but few DXers can
receive them.” Why? Isn’t 8PSK used with
DVB-S2? “Yes, this is true”, explained
Mario, “but feeds don’t transmit in DVB-
S2, instead it is normal DVB-S.” The
problem lies with the readily-available
LNBs: “There’s not only the noise factor”,
explains Mario, “you also have phase
noise. With a high-quality spectrum analyzer
you can see that the carrier drifts
very easily.”
“As long as it drifts fairly slowly, the
receiver is able to follow along. But if
the drift is random, phase noise makes
it impossible to demodulate the 8PSK
constellation, and reception fades away.”
Mario told us of his experiences: “Pro-
In the heart of Teleippica: from here the five
encoders are controlled and the programming is
switched over to the uplink. Susanna DelPapa is
in charge of this control room.
▲