Telstar 4 is Down

An anonymous reader writes "Sometime this morning (Sept. 19) Telstar 4 had a major onboard failure. I just checked a few minutes ago and there are CW carriers up on 11700 MHz V & 12200 MHz H, so the spacecraft would appear to still be in its orbital slot - just no traffic. The Loral Skynet site has no mention of this yet, but supposedly Telstar 8 was already scheduled to replace T4, so they may just speed the process up. This turn of events will no doubt be of some small concern to Intelsat, who recently agreed to purchase most of Loral's US domestic fleet, including T4."

Comments

This may affect you because

[cleveland61]

Telstar 4 is one of the most heavily used TV satellites. We had to move our channels over to Telstar 6 for the time being. (I work for the Erotic Networks) It caries many of the east coast ABC and CBS feeds. I'm sure they were scrambling to find alternate carriers just like we were this morning.

Re:This may affect you because

[LostCluster]

ABC and CBS will never be the ones scrabling for space... it's very common for big-money TV networks (be they mainstream or porn) to have a contract that says if the usual dedicated transponder is gone, they immedately get to take over a specific transponder on another satellite from the company.

Those transponder slots that are targeted by such an agreement are used for short-term "pre-emptable" uses, such as a TV station that needs to broadcast two or three live news reports from another city, or maybe even a small-time sports game. Those people are outta luck on a day like this, because they're gonna get bumped.

Was there really anything important on there?

[bhtooefr]

I've heard porn was on there, and PBS broadcasts (today's schedule) using Telstars, but is that really vital? I mean, none of the internet is down, and telephone services still work. I understand that PBS is educational, but the vital services in a disaster would be news (only affected if Telstar 4 carried news), telephone, food (I don't think Telstars carry commercial transactions), water (ditto), and shelter (THAT doesn't need a Telstar).

Crisis Averted!

[mercuryresearch]

BTW, I just checked w/ New Frontier Media (they provide those porn channels) and the channels have already been rerouted to Telstar 6.

Obviously the satellite industry has its priorities straight. :-)

Telstar 4 info

[gstevens]

Here's a page with information on the television signals carried by Telstar 4:
http://www.lyngsat.com/t4.shtml

A Link that Says a Bit More.

[13Echo]

Here...
Here...
And here...

de-TV Geeked translation

[Argyle]

Telstar 4 is/was a satellite in geosynchronous orbit over the US. The satellite is used for television transmission. Signals are sent up from television facilities, bounced off the bird (nick for a satellite), and then the signal is recieved by cable companies and TV stations for relay to your house.

The main power bus on Telstar 4 died. This means it does not have the power to rebroadcast (bounce) the signals back to earth.

Kinda like the Enterprise losing the warp drive, but still having impulse power to putter around.

These birds cost US$200-300 million to build and US$100-150 million to launch. Failure of this type is a huge loss for Intelsat and a costly transition for the broadcasters.

The companies that used that bird need to switch to other ones. This causes two problems.

1) Antennas - The recievers all need to repoint their antennas at new birds. This is a pain in the ass to do precisely.

2) Bumps - Due to agreements, some companies on Telstar 4 have the right to 'bump' others off the backup birds and take their places. If you get bumped, you are fuxxored.

Make some sense now?

Reading the links is the Rosetta for this story.

[Derivin]

Gah, I read this one 5 times and still didnt understand. After reading all the links and doing some googling here it is again in a lower form of techno-geek (or would it be higher? not sure).

T4 is a broadcast Satalite used to transmit the raw station feeds from the central offices (read networks) to local broadcasters (cable, local ABC affiliate etc).

What Data T4 is responcible for:
Robust broadcast and syndication neighborhood anchored by ABC and CBS; host to SNG, data and distance learning applications. (Also hosted is Spice Channel and two other adult viewing stations which are not mentioned on the main site)

Where it effects:
The central portion of North America

The origional poster mentions the Carrier frequencies that the data is normally transfered on. The poster also mentions that there is no data being broadcast, just the main freq.

I have no way of confirming this myself, and dont see anything about it on any of the satalite pages. All they report is that a satalite is up and running (i.e. the Carrier frequency is present, but nothing on the data being transmitted)

As for the information on replacing the old T4 with T8, well T8 is currently handling south america, and the information I could find on google about the sale of the out dated satalites it vague at best.

Who does this effect:
Possably people out in the midwest are not getting any TV on their cable boxes.
mostlikly its effecting the cable companies and local affiliates who need to reroute to another satalite, and the central offices which also need to switch the feeds to other sat feed providers.

In the end nothing is confirmed.

Skynet confirms its dead

[netmask]

I called Skynet, and this was their quote:

"Telstar 4 experienced a short circuit of primary its power bus and is not fixable. This satellite is offline permanently."

Short Article

[fishybell]

I found a short article that outlines some basic details of what they (Loral) know now and what they're doing to alleviate any problems to the end-user (you).

Re:I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is

[deglr6328]

CW can also mean "continuous wave" such as when youre talking about lasers that aren't pulsed (eg. a laser pointer is CW)

NOT offtopic!!!

[ashitaka]

Well, maybe a bit.

The 'Telstar' the parent refers to is the 1962 pop instrumental piece written by by Joe Meek and performed by the Tornadoes who became the first U.K. band to have a #1 hit in the States, even before the Beatles. 'Telstar' was inspired by the launch of Telstar 1.

Of course, this is way, way before 99.9% of the Slashdot readership were born so I'm not suprised it was missed. Hell, even I was only 1 year old.

Re:Huh?

[LostCluster]

If you're in the telecom industry, it's a newsworthy event because the overall satellite bandwith that reaches the CONUS (Contentential USA) area took a downward hit this morning. Clearly, all of the signals that moved accross T4 are gonna need to relocate elsewhere.

However, most of the major users of such a big satellite like national TV/Radio concerns know that it's only a matter of time before something like this happens to a satellite, so they've got automatic switchovers at their affiliates that keep them flowing even if a network show is on at the time. The problem comes to anybody who has "preemptable" satellite space for today, because they may just find themselves hit somebody who's willing to pay the premium fee to bump them. Other users in a pinch might just send something that normally goes over a satellite through landlines today, etc.

It's a major sudden redirection of large ammounts of traffic in the national communication infrastructure, although not exactly earth shaking because most people won't see much of a disruption. (Galaxy IV was a bit more newsworthy fo a failure a few years ago because it took out most of SkyTel's pagers...)

So, it's interesting to some people and other people don't care. Isn't that what /. is all about?

Re:I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is

[SYFer]

Actually, the good people at Loral provide a handy and informative glossary on their site. Note also that this glossary has been hacked by one "GUL7" (see first entry). heh. That poster's girlfreind was right.