Eutel W2 16E off air

[Analoguesat]

All signals from W2 disappeared at about 2000 UTC this evening. (Just as many folk were settling down to watch the footy on Diema!) D

Shes currently totally off air, although the colocated EB16A is still on air. Im monoitoring the Als&t channel on 10953H to see if its a depointing episode (if so the signals may return then fade away again, although nothing note in the last 20 minutes or so)

[mark36]

wondered what happened,fortunatly i can fall back on 13e.
by the way i haven't a clue what your on about apart from its down but thanks for keeping peeps updated.
maybe you could explain a little more to us sat newbies who are interested

[Analoguesat]

At the moment all I can tell you is the old girl is broken!

A depointing is where the satellite loses its normal earth lock and puts itself into a safe mode. The tech guys at the control station can normally recover from this by slowly swinging the bird around back to its earth lock position and getting the transmission antennas realigned as they are obviously not much good if they are pointing way off target or out into space!

As the satellite transmission beams are realigned you can get pictures coming and going as the beams swing around over the earth surface.. I havent seen any evidence of this yet so maybe the old gal has blown a fuse or been hit by space junk.... Impossible to say until some definite news leaks out of Eutelsat HQ, but I guarantee theres some frantic blokes at the control station right now trying to work out

1) what the hell has happened

2) how to either fix it or work around it.

[martin-f]

thanks for info Analoguesat i was wondering why i had no lock on this bird

[Robbo]

LOL, I put a dish up for someone last week for Tring, they have not rung me yet to say it's not working.

[mark36]

thanks for that Analoguesat.
very informative and easy to understand

[satelliteman]

A bit late to try the spectrum on 16e but could be interesting.

[Analoguesat]

According to a post on the DS forum the signals just went off, so its looking increasingly like a failure rather than a depoint.

[satelliteman]

Some transponders are back and have possibly been moved over to EB16 but still the same as of 7.55am

[Analoguesat]

This just came up on the Eutel site:

Paris, 28 January 2010

Eutelsat Communications (Euronext Paris: ETL) confirms that a technical anomaly occurred in the evening of January 27 on the W2 satellite located at 16° East. This incident is under full investigation by Eutelsat in collaboration with the satellite's manufacturer, Thales Alenia Space.

Immediate actions have been taken in parallel in order to propose alternative capacity to all customers affected by the anomaly, and services are progressively being restored.

So some services are being switched over to EB16A, I suspect others will be moved over to Eurobird 9A, Eutel W2A, or W2M<!-- google_ad_section_end -->