Compared to all that goes into creating and producing television programming, the sci-fi sounding prospect of transmitting them over satellite TV equipment is much, much simpler. After all, every type of television program presents its own unique types of problems, even though all satellite television is pretty much the same as the next. Even though it takes a rocket to get there, it’s not rocket science once a satellite itself is orbiting the earth. There’s really nothing to it.

Up, Up And Right Here

The process of selecting which channels that will be included in the subscription package is usually the hard part. Is it going to be sports and military channels for him, or soap opera’s and lovey dovey shows for her? The programming people who create the content for these great channels all pretty much 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 it is for live sports.

The orbiting satellite uses a downlink to send the programming back down to earth. On its way back, 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 regardless of how loaded or stripped down their subscription package may be. The signal moves from the dish to the TV through the use of a special cable. Speaking of cable, subscribers to cable TV get their signal in the same way. The same type of satellite equipment picks up the download from space, decrypts it, and then sends it to the cable station. The station then 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 really pretty obvious. The cable customer receives his programming from the big dishes at the cable TV company, while the satellite customer has his own dish somewhere on his or her own property. 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, however, if the family wants to view two different programs at once, then two satellite dishes will be needed.

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