RMA Cable Sun Outage Notification

Sun Outages or Solar interference occurs every February/March and September/October of each year, and results in the degradation or loss of satellite signal for short periods of time each day for about 2 weeks. We may see these outages between October 4th and October 12th.

Solar interference is an inherent part of satellite operations. The effects will be seen on most channels and will occur during various times of the day. Interruptions can last from just a few minutes to up to 15 minutes a day and can range from mild to severe.

A Sun Outage takes place when the orbital positions of the satellite and the sun are in one line. The earth station receives signals from both, but the more powerful sun rays subdue the desired signal, causing a loss of service. Since RMA Cable receives our signals from a variety of satellites, the Solar Outages can occur at different times on different channels.

Note: Sun Outages do not affect Internet service.

Service Impacts

You may see sparkles or blocking in the first and last days of the sun outage timeframe. It may gradually deteriorate to the point of total outage (frozen picture) on the middle few days.

Some channels will experience blocks or freeze frames in the picture before and after the peak times.

• These are the channels we receive digitally from the satellite.
• Once it reaches peak, the interference gradually decreases and becomes less noticeable each day after the peak.
• Unfortunately, there is technically nothing that can be done to prevent the sun outage effects.
• Sun outages are a short-term problem
• Sun outages are not TV outages
• If any group of channels is affected for much more than 15 minutes or if all channels are affected at one time, the RMA office should be notified. There may be a problem that is unrelated to sun outages or you may need to contact us.
• The degree of interference depends, among other things, on the bandwidth that the receiver is using at the time.
• As the sun moves across the sky it will move directly behind each of the dozen or so satellites we receive signals from, causing channels on that satellite to go out for a few minutes each day, over the course of the day different channels will go out at different times.