Friday, 31 March 2006 SOLAR ECLIPSE INTERFERES WITH SATELLITE RESTORATION The solar eclipse that occurred around midnight last night has interfered with and set back the restoration of SKY's digital satellite service. The eclipse blocked sunlight to the solar cells on the satellite requiring the cells to be recharged again after the eclipse and before the process of realigning the signal with earth could continue. The satellite signal was lost after a routine positioning procedure to the satellite by Optus. SKY and Optus immediately put into operation their signal recovery plans. SKY Television's CEO, John Fellet said "Our priority has been to get the service up and running. SKY and Optus staff have worked through the night to re-power the satellite and restore a signal to SKY. It's a delicate process and it's still continuing." SKY apologises for loss of SKY satellite services resulting from an outage on the Optus B1 Satellite that provides SKY's signal. Mr Fellet said that he did not expect customers to pay for a service they didn't receive and SKY will remedy this with a credit to customer accounts. Updates will be posted on www.skytv.co.nz or www.skybusiness.co.nz Email: tobrien@xxxxxxxxxxx ----- Original Message ----- From: "Barry Wilkins" <barry.barrywilkins@xxxxxxxxx> To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 2:43 PM Subject: [opendtv] Optus B1 satellite off air since around 6.30pm yesterday NZ time > Hi folks > We in New Zealand have since last night lost our only Satellite TV > communications to the whole country as the repositioning of the Optus B1 > satellite went somewhat wrong. > > Do any of you experts know why it should take more than 12 hours (and > counting) to correct this problem. I have my suspicions there is a little > more to the problem than an error in manouvre instructions. One > possibility > I have considered is that the satellite has actually run out of propellent > to make the required changes. It is a rather old bird as I understand it > and > is supposed to be past its used by date. Is this correct? > > Barry Wilkins ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.