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Satellite TV From a Moving Car
An anonymous reader sent us an article about an in-car digital satellite television system. that can stay trained on the satellite even while moving. Of course, Most amusing is all the comments about how TV in cars is for passengers, because as we know, the drivers are too busy talking on their cell phones.
hmmm... I think that in most states, it's illegal to have a TV mounted where the driver can see it. There's a reason TVs/DVDs (and now satellite, apparently) are showing up in vehicles... kids. It's a life saver on long trips. Of course, I realize the union of the sets "/.'ers" and "have kids" is rather small...
Yes, it will work with a TiVo.
These are pretty common on RV's these days. I full time in a 1987 Bluebird Wanderlodge bus (both mobile office and home).
We installed a Tracstar SV360 9 months ago, one of the low-profile ones. This is supposed to be one of the better units.
They work ok... yes, signal skips under bridges.
I5 in southern Oregon is pretty much useless with mountain and tall trees next to the highway.
DirecTV requires you to point "toward Texas" for the bird, so northern states are much worse. And these dishes tend to be smaller, so clounds can hurt you too. Seattle is not a good place for this... steep angle to aim and clouds consipire against you.
I use the in-motion dish for "instant on" more than watching while cruising. It is nice to pull over at a rest area and be able to turn on the news for a few minutes.... since the in-motion always has signal lock, no need to wait to align like the lesser dishes.
When camping in wooded areas, you pretty much decide what your priority is. Nice woodeed spot or clear TV reception? Low tech is often better for camping. 100' of coax and a regular dish on a tripod is much better for camping... as you can always carry the dish out into a clear area. So having a fancy expensive in-motion system isn't always the best... it depends on your needs.
I was just wondering the same thing in relation to XM Radio, to which i found this:
XM-Radio is a Satellite Based Radio Broadcast System that operates around 2.3 GHz from two 15,000 watt satellites; one named "ROCK," at 115 Degrees West, the other named "ROLL" at 85.0 Degrees West. The significance of this service and that of Sirius Radio, a similar service, is that these services need to "fill in" the shadows caused by buildings and other structures that may block the satellite signal. To accomplish this, XM-Radio alone will set up about 1,500 high-power terrestrial repeaters. Each market will typically have dual repeaters at 2337.485 MHz and 2340.015 MHz. A hefty buffer is an integral part of each receiver, and is very practical when going through tunnels.
Using a buffer of sorts for the signal would definitely deal with this issue. As for XM using 1,500 repeaters, i'm not really sure if this would be done for TV signals also.