# Is theres any such thing a rain proof dish?



## Steveox (Apr 21, 2004)

I need a dish to hook up dish network and cant be interupted by rain. Is this possibile?


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## Curtis0620 (Apr 22, 2002)

Try cable.


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## Mike123abc (Jul 19, 2002)

100% immune? No, you also run into the issue of storms at the uplink center causing problem. I believe the standard dishes are for 99.6% average uptime. If you live in an area with significantly more rain than other parts of the country, your only choice would be to upgrade the size of the Dish. But, even then it is a diminishing return. You might move from 99.6 to 99.999 but still have rain fade. You could put up a multimeter sized dish like they do in AK (3-4 meter).

But, 2x per year you will have periods of sunfade (even cable companies have this since Cband is effected by this).

The uplink centers will have storms that can cause problems too.


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## HappyGoLucky (Jan 11, 2004)

Steveox said:


> I need a dish to hook up dish network and cant be interupted by rain. Is this possibile?


Only if you can shield the signal completely between your dish and the satellite residing about 22,800 miles up.


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## Richard King (Mar 25, 2002)

Nah, probably only need to shield it to about 70,000 feet or so.


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## jpurkey (May 15, 2003)

Richard King said:


> Nah, probably only need to shield it to about 70,000 feet or so.


A large fan to blow the rain/clouds away?

A large laser to burn the rain/clouds away?

A 20 mile tube? (More or less depending on elevation.)

Hook your receiver up to the Arecibo radio telescope? (Assuming DBS signals reach Puerto Rico...)


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## invaliduser88 (Apr 23, 2002)

Here ya go! http://www.nrao.edu/imagegallery/images/GBT2_lo.jpg

:engel10:


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## Richard King (Mar 25, 2002)

> A large laser to burn the rain/clouds away?


Nope, that would burn up the satellites.



> A 20 mile tube? (More or less depending on elevation.)


I like it.


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## Slordak (Dec 17, 2003)

The only thing I can offer here that hasn't already been said (ahem) is to peak your existing dish if your signal strength during normal sunny conditions is lower than it should be. The better your normal signal, the less chance you will have of experiencing rain fade. You should be trying for a signal strength of 110 or higher if you're using a Dish 500.


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## PSB (Oct 4, 2002)

A BIGGER dish is as good as its ever going to get, also if you can keep your dish sheltered and even dry it will help but nothing will save you from rain fade when its really wet outside.


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## HappyGoLucky (Jan 11, 2004)

jpurkey said:


> Hook your receiver up to the Arecibo radio telescope? (Assuming DBS signals reach Puerto Rico...)


How about an array, like the VLA using 15 to 20 dishes spread out over a large geographical area, then somehow mux their signal into one. Yeah, that's it!


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## MarkA (Mar 23, 2002)

Cable has rainfade and sunfade issues also (though they do use bigger dishes). It doesn't just go down in a normal rain if the dish is aimed right, only in a very heavy storm. And you could use a pair of 24" dishes if you wanted to improve things some.


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## mnassour (Apr 23, 2002)

For what it's worth, I've had KU signals to a 3 meter dish interrupted by rain. You can get 99% reliability with DBS...but not 100%.


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## bnaivar (May 11, 2004)

The rainfade problem isn't with the dish. It's with the frequency of the satellite broadcast. KU and Ka signal waves are physicaly the same size as a raindrop or a snow flake. That's why the rain (and yes, you can get snow fade in a blizzard) blocks the signal. If you keep increasing the size of the dish, eventually you'll end up with too much signal, and overload the receiver.


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