Jalisco residents in the early 1990s had to have 12- to 18-foot diameter satellite dishes to pick up “North of the Border” (NOB) English-language TV programming.
Now a Shaw Direct satellite dish is only about 2 feet across when watching in Canada. And Dish and DirecTV satellite dishes are about the same size if you are watching the programming in the USA. That’s because the frequencies used increased from approximately 4 to 12 GHz. And with the frequencies three times has high (in oversimplified terms) the receiving satellite dishes need to be about 1/3rd as large. Sirius and XM radio use even higher frequencies and that’s one of the primary reasons their satellite antennas/dishes are even smaller.
But along with putting up satellites that broadcast at higher frequencies, therefore requiring smaller satellite antennas to receive the signal, the designers are getting better at focusing their signals on the intended country with less bleed-over into adjoining countries like Mexico.
So to counteract the very weak signals that bleed over into Mexico, in Jalisco you need bigger satellite dishes. In fact we need such large satellite dishes to pick up the HD signals from DISH USA that many have given up on DISH altogether in central Mexico. Even with the largest Ku band satellite dish readily available, 2.4 meters (8 feet) in diameter you can’t get reliable signals from the satellites carrying the HD programming. But according to CP Electronics owner Charles Kinninger, hundreds of standard definition Dish USA customers at Lakeside rarely have a problem using only one dish.
But recently CP Electronics out of Guadalajara discovered that DirecTV USA has bounced up the transmission frequencies on some of its newer satellites to about 20 Gigahertz therefore requiring an even smaller receiving satellite antenna in the US. And here in central Mexico, you can receive a reasonable signal on the 2.4 meter Ku band satellite dish.
It gets better; while with DISH USA, if you want the standard and HD programming, one often has to have three satellite dishes each pointing at a different satellite, the three DirecTV geosynchronous satellites are so close together (the higher frequency satellites are positioned 1.8 degrees east and west of the center Ku band satellite) that you can pick up the signals from all three satellites at once from a single 2.4-meter satellite dish.
Warning: Just like DISH USA, DirecTV sends network programming for most cities on spot beams focused so tightly on those cities, that they’re not viewable more than a few hundred miles away from that city. It would appear that the only the cities of SF and/or NY are available in our area. Check with your satellite dealer to make sure.
My favorite satellite TV delivery system is still Star Choice (a.k.a. Shaw Direct) because I can get the network feeds for my home towns of Seattle and Vancouver plus most everything else I like to watch and on a small 2 by 3 foot elliptical dish.
