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Basic Satellite TV Equipment
By Tony Cunningham

Compared to the complexity of creating and producing television programming, the sci-fi sounding prospect of transmitting them over satellite TV equipment is much simpler. After all, every type of television program presents its own type of problem while all satellite television is pretty much alike. Once the satellite itself is orbiting the earth, there's nothing to it.

Up, Up And Right Here

The very difficult process of selecting the channels that will be included in the subscription package is usually the hard part. The programming people who create the content for those channels all do the same thing. They use an uplink to encrypt, compress and send the programming to the appropriate satellite. This process is the same for taped dramas as for live sports.

The satellite uses a downlink to send the programming back down to earth. On its way to earth, the signal is captured by satellite dishes which decrypt the channels that are contained in the customer's subscription package. This step involves pretty basic satellite TV equipment. Your neighbors will have dishes and hookups very similar to yours no matter what subscription package they have. The signal moves from the dish to the TV by way of special cable. Speaking of cable, subscribers to cable TV get their signal the same way. The same kind of satellite TV equipment picks up the download from space, decrypts it and sends it to the cable station. The station sends the signal for the customer's subscription package by way of cable to the customer's home TV.

The difference between cable and satellite TV equipment is obvious. The cable customer receives his programming from the big satellite dishes at the cable TV company while the satellite customer has his own dish. Today's satellite TV equipment only allows a single channel to come into the home at one time. The channel can be viewed by more than one television set at one time, but if the family wants to view two different programs at once, then two satellite dishes are needed.

The signal that arrives from the cable company can be split to allow each TV to view a different channel or any number can view the same one. Viewers believe that satellite TV equipment can fall victim to signal obstruction and they're right. However, obstructions caused by weather can affect the signal going to the cable customers just as easily. No matter what kind of satellite TV equipment you have, the choices and options are huge.

Author Details:
Tony Cunningham is a gadgets fanatic writing about electrical items such as cellular mobile phones, HDTV, Satellite TV and gaming consoles such as the Xbox360.

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