I love tech. And I think it's really cool and love the speed of 5G technology. Of the three types of 5G, the "mid band" 5G gets you 300 mb/sec to 1 gb/sec speeds. How great is that?
Unless, of course, it interferes with your satellite signal. And here at AllisonHouse, we know about that all too well.
When a telecom turned on their 5G on towers close to our NOAAport receiver dish one fine Saturday morning, I saw that we were not getting any data (and was blasted out of bed from our alerting system to kindly let me know that, LOL!). Sure enough, we had a signal, but the carrier-to-noise (CN) was really low, well below what was needed to decode packets. I pretty much knew what that was about. Thankfully, our system instantly switched to a backup feed automatically, so we didn't lose any data. I talked to our engineer, and he immediately knew it was 5G interference from a 5G provider causing the issue. We ordered the 5G filter that the National Weather Service uses (with a very minor model difference that didn't change any of the specs) to solve the problem; that filter knocks that interference down by 30 dB, which is a lot! We got the filter installed, and we were back to having data, although we were losing more packets than we had before the 5G was turned on.
Then came the NOAAport satellite move from Galaxy 28 to 31. We repointed the dish, and got a signal. It was a video signal that we had locked onto on an adjacent satellite at 121 degrees west. Oops. Then we tried to adjust the polarity, but after weeks of equipment failures, repoints and adjustments, we just couldn't lock a signal. We were told to go to a second engineer who could solve almost any issue. He tried and tried, and we still couldn't get a signal to lock. Finally, it did lock, but only intermittently, and still, no data. And when we saw the scope, we knew what it was. 5G interference! But how?
Well, the frustrated engineer had the lights and bells come on in his head. The 5G filter we were using was foreign to him, but then he realized it had the specs of another brand that he saw was causing TV and radio stations he services to have the same issues. So, he told us we needed to swap our 5G filter with a much better one: the Alga Microwave C-band 5G filter (blue). Instead of having a 30 dB rejection spec, this one has 70 dB+ rejection from 3900 MHZ and below, and at least 25 dB from 4200 MHZ and above. It was the frequencies below 3900 that were killing us, so the extra 40+ dB of rejection was needed.
So, this past weekend, the new filter was put on. Bam! What we had locked on to was indeed NOAAport, and without peaking the signal, data immediately started coming in. The engineer peaked the dish, and then precisely adjusted the polarity on the LNB. This latter step is absolutely critical, because a video broadcast could be coming on the opposite polarity on the same frequency of NOAAport! In fact, a test video broadcast on the opposite polarity and same frequency was performed last Friday night, and no issues were noted on some of the other dishes I monitor. In any case, with a 3.7 meter dish, we get a signal of roughly -26 dBm at the dish, and -33 dBm at our receiver, with a C/N of 16 on average on a clear day, just a touch lower when it's cloudy. This is lower than I want, since the NWS C/N standard is 17 dB, but we still have roughly 5-6 dB of signal "pad " for clouds and precipitation before we lose data. We should stay up unless rainfall rates in the path of the signal reach about 2" per hour.
So, now we are back to our winning ways. We do lose a few packets here and there due to HVAC turning on and off every day at our location, but the losses are around 200 packets/day total from the 5G and RF nightmare our dish is located in...surrounded by towers pounding out the 300 mb/sec goodness, as well as 100,000 watt FM radio and 1 megawatt TV stations. And let me make one thing perfectly clear: I'm not mad at the telecoms at all about our troubles, speaking strictly for myself. Rather, I'm really not happy that the FCC allowed the cellular companies to intrude on the C-band signals in the first place. But, that ship has long sailed, so we just have to deal with it.
I wrote this in the hopes that this could be helpful for someone. I know there are NOAAport 5G nightmares still going on with this, and more to come as telecoms build out their networks over the next 5 years.
