How Satellite Works

Beam it Up

While Satellite TV deals with technological things like beaming signals between sources, launching machines into space and aligning receivers, it's not necessarily something that's out of this world or hard to understand. Here's a basic rundown on the Satellite television process.

Where it Starts

The Satellite TV you watch from your home comes from a satellite in the Earth's orbit, in a part of space called the Clarke Belt. It doesn't start there, however. The signal originates from the channel which provides the programs you watch every day. From there, it moves to the broadcast center, which is the center that gathers the feeds from different programming sources and shoots the signals into space to its satellites that are in geostationary orbit (an orbit that matches the Earth's rotation is a geosynchronous orbit — in the case of satellite, the Clarke belt is above the Earth's equator, making it a geostationary orbit).

Where it Goes

Once the satellites receive the signals from the broadcast centers, they then transmit the signal back to Earth, where any number of satellite dishes can receive it and interpret it. Standard satellite dishes (like the ones you see on rooftops) are curved so that the signal can be caught inside and bounced to the feedhorn, the tip that points inward. After it hits the feedhorn, the signal is passed through other components that convert it before it is eventually processed by your satellite receiver and then displayed on your television. All of this is encoded digitally, to produce crystal clear sharp images on the screen.