Illustration that’s clearly not to scale, and pointing to the wrong part of the world.

It’s a little known fact that at regular times of the day over certain known periods of the year we suffer a degradation of communications with geostationary satellites. This is all down to something that is known as an Equinox. An Equinox in this case is where the sun passes behind the satellite that is communicating with ground stations on Earth, in such a position that you could link the Sun, the satellite and the ground station together with a single straight line. During this period the immense power and broad radiation spectrum of the Sun introduce so much interference to the legitimate signal from the satellite that normal communications are temporarily interrupted.

It all sounds a bit sci-fi really, but there’s a real reason as to why I’m writing about this here. If you enjoy listening to Absolute Radio, Absolute Classic Rock or Absolute 80s on Sky, Freesat, Virgin Media or TalkTalk TV (was Tiscali TV) then you may experience interruption to the service as the sun passes behind the satellite (Eurobird 1) these are relayed though. The times and dates for these are: -

25th February – 6th March @ 10:07 UTC +/- 15 minutes.

Stuart (Eddie)