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Looking for a niche? Satellite dish TV and Satellite Dish Internet Access may be the way to go. Coming soon: The latest information on Satellite dish installation and troubleshooting...

Because electromagnetic radiation in the communication spectrum cannot penetrate the earth, all beyond line of sight broadcasting was at one time restricted to what local affiliates could provide, to AM radio bounced off an unpredictable ionosphere or to a 19th century cable network that crisscrossed land and sea.

In late 1945, Arthur C. Clarke envisioned geocentric communications satellites. These small space stations would revolve in circular orbit directly over the equator at an altitude of 22,237 miles. Their period of revolution would exactly equal the earthÍs period of rotation so that to an observer on the ground each satellite would appear to hover motionless in the sky. Fixed parabolic dish antennas could transmit to and receive from these unmanned stations in space thus eliminating the line of sight limitation and allowing the earth to become unified at least on the information and entertainment level.

About 20 years after Clarke published his idea in Wireless Magazine, geocentric satellites began to appear and today they number in the hundreds. The narrow geocentric ring above the equator is ñfullî in the sense that if there were more, they would be too close to be useful as discrete transmitting entities. Nevertheless ingenious methods of signal polarization and digital compression have given us ever more TV channels and other communication assets.

TodayÍs satellite infrastructure, for our purpose as electrical designers and installers, provides TV and Internet access to homes and businesses throughout the world. Satellite is thought to be ñin competitionî with cable, but they are two sides of the same coin in that a cable head typically picks up its signal from a dish array and even at a one-family satellite dish equipped dwelling, the signal is brought to the receiver by cable.

The electrician is well positioned to pick up this work. If you do the low voltage work when you wire a new building, why not put a field strength meter in your toolbox and add this installation to the contract?

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