Tech Forum

I thought I'd report back on the Solar Outage issue.
The data that I had found on the solar calculator was almost dead on. With our 2 meter dish and specifying the location of our stake center, the outage was predicted to occur at around 11:02 AM - just after the morning session. At 11:03 AM we lost the signal for about 5 minutes getting it back around 11:08 AM.

Sunday's solar outage is predicted to be about a minute longer and occur at approximately 1 minute earlier. As long as it's after the morning session we'll not complain.

http://www.satellite-calculations.com/S ... erence.php

techgy wrote:With our 2 meter dish we lost the signal for about 5 minutes

We have a 3 meter dish and a system that must be very forgiving or have a better Carrier/Noise ratio than 12 dB.

With a predicted drop of 9.4 dB during a 10-minute window, we lost nothing on Saturday. On Sunday at the moment of the projected peak loss, the picture froze for a moment and there was a pop in the sound. That's it.

I wonder how many times over the years here we have been affected by Solar Transit problems. I realize the planets do not align every time, but in all my years I only remember one occasion where the broadcast was lost for about a minute when all else seemed to be working just fine.

I noticed that paying with the calculator showed it was surprisingly sensitive to location. Just getting it to the city isn't good enough. You want to get down to the nearest block. Errors in latitude results in errors in how severe and which days it falls on. I don't think it's as sensitive to longitude - that results in the exact time it hits.

But sun outages always fall toward the end of the first session and the in-between. It's not going to hit in the afternoon session or priesthood - at least not in the Americas.

russellhltn wrote:I noticed that paying with the calculator showed it was surprisingly sensitive to location. Just getting it to the city isn't good enough. You want to get down to the nearest block. Errors in latitude results in errors in how severe and which days it falls on. I don't think it's as sensitive to longitude - that results in the exact time it hits.

I entered the exact street address of our stake center. On both days of conference the predicted outage time fell just a minute or two after conferenced ended.

[Moderator note: A tangential discussion about communications regarding this outage and more general training resources has been split out to a separate topic: Clerk communications.]