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Satellite Dish

The satellite dish is a directional antenna designed to focus on a specific point. The standard satellite dish antenna is a parabolic dish made out of or coated in radio reflective material, which forms a concave lens with a feed horn located at its focus.

When transmitting the signal is produced at the feed horn and spreads out to the dish where it is then reflects and is focussed in a narrow beam. A normal flashlight or torch works in exactly the same way only with radio signals of much higher frequency known as visible light produced from an transmitter known as a light bulb.

The beam passes through the space or air to the receiving dish which does the reverse of the transmitter by collecting the signal and focussing it on a central point – again in the feed horn much the same way a magnifying glass works to focus light – though that uses a convex rather than a concave lens.

In this system a receiving dish cannot transmit signals and vice-versa.

Satellite radio signals operate at very high frequencies in the Ku frequency range (12 GHz to 14 GHz or 12 to 14 thousand million cycles per second) and with all radio waves the higher the frequency the more the signal behaves like visible light. Because of this the system is line of sight, which means any obstructions in the path of the signal, will greatly decrease the signal level at the receiver. This is important in the installation process to obviously place the receiver dish in the line of sight of the satellite.

In some systems, the dish needs to pick up signals from two or more satellites at the same time. The satellites may be close enough together that a regular dish with a single horn can pick up signals from both. This compromises quality somewhat, because the dish isn't aimed directly at one or more of the satellites. A new dish design uses two or more horns to pick up different satellite signals. As the beams from different satellites hit the curved dish, they reflect at different angles so that one beam hits one of the horns and another beam hits a different horn.

Inside the feed horn of the receiver is the Low Noise Blockdown Converter, or LNB. This device amplifies the radio signal from the dish and filters any radio noise present. The signal is then passed to the decoder inside your home.