The modern entertainment world is awash with ways of and devices for using up our spare time and at the same time filling our brains with mindless trivia and advertising junk messages. In between the programmes and the music, the message is ‘buy,buy, buy; from me, me, me’. This is one of the reasons why satellite radio has become so popular, but I will expand on that later.
One of the main reasons why people like satellite radio is because if you travel quite long distances, you do not keep getting out of range of the station it took you ten minutes to find and search for another one.
Satellite radio stations tend to have a large to very large footprint. In other words, you ought to be able to keep listening to the same station if you want without continuously retuning.
Not only that, but satellite radio is always digital in nature which means that the signal will be better and the ensuing sound quality will be far better too. This means that the background noise that we have been conventionally used to has virtually disappeared.
The sound from a good piece of digital stereo equipment is second to none. In reality an AF /FM radio cannot hold a candle to a satellite radio station.
The cost of satellite radio gear has dropped dramatically, which has increased its public awareness and uptake, which in turn has increased sales and allowed the price to fall further. Nowadays, a satellite radio receiver is as cheap as chips.
Not only that, but in the early days, in the Seventies and Eighties, parabolic dishes needed to be extremely directional. They had to be trained on the satellite as a satellite TV dish still has to be now, but a radio system does not have to be so accurate anymore, which allows them to be used in cars and boats.
If you get fed up of the adverts that constantly drone out of terrestrial radio at you, it can be a good idea to find a satellite radio channel that suits you and subscribe to it. For $10-12 a month, you will get the type of programming that you prefer without all the ads!. Isn’t that magnificent?
As with all forms of entertainment, at the end of the day it is up to the end user to choose whether the cost of satellite radio is acceptable, but one thing is for sure, satellite radio increases one’s choices.
If you are bored with the current range of radio stations in your area then the thousands of extra, often world-wide stations available to you on satellite radio may be just the thing that you are looking for, particularly if you are searching for a station in a foreign language that is not covered locally.
Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a range of subjects, but is now involved with Bose alarm clocks. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Bose Digital Radio.
Some Facts About Satellite Radio Technology
Sunday, April 17th, 2011Satellite radio technology is similar to cable or satellite television and it is definitely here to stay. There are a number of reasons for this: the quality of the broadcasts is higher, the quality of the apparatus’s reception is higher and the universal coverage of the station, that is to say the so-called satellite’s footprint is far greater as well.
This has the effect that if you travel long distances, you will be able to stay with the same channel without having to look for a new one every forty or fifty miles as you need to do with AM or FM radio stations.
In order to reach this quality, the recording and playback speed has to be around the 384 kbps level. The music tracks are catalogued in a comparable way to the MP3 system, which uses names called ID3 tags.
Each station on satellite radio endevours to create its own identity. A music station might try this by playing music only of one sort or from only one era or decade. This means that you may get a satellite radio station called 1970’s Punk music or Twentieth Century Classical Music.
On some stations, the music controller or disc jockey will choose, say, fifty minutes worth of music, will listen to it in order to ascertain that the quality and the order are correct and then let the computer play it over the airwaves. This leaves ten minutes every hour for the news and then the programme can be repeated automatically.
Satellite transmission uses digital recordings and each channel is encoded on a different frequency. Similarly, each decoder, say, in your car or your home has to recognize and decode each channel separately as well. This coding and decoding is done very quickly, in fact in what is called ‘real time’.
The resulting binary or digital code is then turned into into analogue signals so that your speakers can replay it. This process produces sound which is just about of CD quality.
The broadcasting satellites are in a geo-stationary orbit at 23,000 miles above the equator and have a large footprint which is the name given to the area of ground that is capable of receiving their transmissions.
In America, for example, the two fields concentrated on at first were the densely populated east and west coasts in order to maximize possible income. One satellite would be incapable of covering the whole of the United States in that orbit.
In order to receive satellite broadcasts, you will have to use a special antenna on your decoder. This antenna must be capable of picking up L-band broadcasts for it to be of use.
These new antennas are a huge improvement on the satellite dishes (comparable to those used for satellite TV) that one used to have to have in order to take advantage of satellite radio technology
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a range of subjects, but is currently involved with Bose radio alarm clocks. If you would like to kcurrently more, please visit our website at Bose Digital Radio.
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