When in doubt, call an old guy with a pocket protector

[kenglish]

Major chaos across America today, as DirecTV seems to lose a satellite.
Speculation is that the old satellite has died of old age. Even DirecTV didn't know what to say, claiming things like "a satellite positioning error".
It's just the twice yearly "sun outage", as it's often called. It will happen at various times for the next few days, then be OK until next time. Just like always.
Sadly, no old-timers were around to raise an eyebrow, Joe Spears style, and explain it with an Alabama drawl. 🤭

[CAwasinNJ]

Feb 27, 2024 18:58:59 GMT -6 kenglish said:

Major chaos across America today, as DirecTV seems to lose a satellite.
Speculation is that the old satellite has died of old age. Even DirecTV didn't know what to say, claiming things like "a satellite positioning error".
It's just the twice yearly "sun outage", as it's often called. It will happen at various times for the next few days, then be OK until next time. Just like always.
Sadly, no old-timers were around to raise an eyebrow, Joe Spears style, and explain it with an Alabama drawl. 🤭

Given that the issue started very early Tuesday morning (about 3AM) and continued all day it's clearly NOT a solar outage.

[kenglish]

I wonder if we'll ever be told what exactly happened. Sounds like it only affected the Ka spot beams, but those are far more directional than the Ku beams. We'll have to see what happens over the next few days.

[kenglish]

I was at the Tabernacle many years ago, during Conference, when (I think it was Westar-4) rolled.
We lost service for twenty seconds. Many people said it seemed like hours.
I immediately grabbed my address book, with the secret numbers, and called the Western Union TT&C center, and got the full story. They were doing their routine "Center-of-Box" ranging on their big uplink dish, and hit a dirty spot on the potentiometer. The dish swung away from the satellite, and the satellite rolled a bit, until it lost sight of the earth. Being a spin-stabilized bird, it took a few seconds to switch to the on-board earth sensor, then slowly rolled to find the earth, while the engineers got the big tracking dish back in service.
I used a can of Planter's Peanuts and it's plastic lid to give a quick course in Satellite operations to a whole bunch of suits from the LDS church. All in all- it was a fairly normal failure, and all the backups worked as they were designed, so everybody was happy.
It's nice to have contact with the engineers, rather than getting info from a help desk, sometimes.

[CAwasinNJ]

Feb 28, 2024 12:33:27 GMT -6 kenglish said:

It's nice to have contact with the engineers, rather than getting info from a help desk, sometimes.

I agree, and not just with help desks. I don't use official tech support channels much, but I do a fair amount with online tech forums. Both suffer from I'm-going-to-assume-you're-an-idiot-itis. I don't blame them. Most of the people they deal with ARE idiots. Still, it's a bit annoying to have to convince someone for the umpteenth time to forgo the usual PEBKAC type errors and get to the serious stuff.