Satellite Radio Technology

Satellite radio technology is similar to cable or satellite television and it is certainly here to stay. There are several reasons for this: the quality of the broadcasts is higher, the quality of the apparatus's reception is higher and the general coverage of the channel, that is to say the so-called satellite's footprint is much greater as well.

This means that if you drive long distances, you will be able to stay with the same station without having to look for a new one every forty or fifty miles as you need to do with AM or FM radio channels.

In order to achieve this quality, the recording and playback speed needs 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 may try this by playing music only of one sort or from only one period or decade. This means that you might get a satellite radio channel called 1970's Punk music or Twentieth Century Classical Music.

On some channels, the music controller or disc jockey will choose, say, fifty minutes worth of music, will listen to it in order to determine 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 replayed automatically.

Satellite broadcasting uses digital recordings and each station is encoded on a different frequency. Similarly, each decoder, say, in your car or your home needs to recognize and decode each channel separately too. This coding and decoding is done very quickly, in fact in what is referred to as 'real time'.

The resulting binary or digital code is then translated into analogue signals so that your speakers can reproduce it. This process produces sound which is just about of CD quality.

The transmitting satellites are in a geo-static orbit at 23,000 miles above the Earth and have a large footprint which is the name given to the region of ground that is capable of receiving their transmissions.


In America, for example, the two areas concentrated on at first were the heavily populated east and west coasts in order to maximize possible income. One satellite would be incapable of covering the entirety 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 receiving L-band transmissions for it to be effective.

These new antennas are a big improvement on the parabolic dishes (comparable to those used for satellite television) that one used to have to have in order to take advantage of satellite radio technology

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a variety of topics, but is now involved with Bose Radio Alarm Clock. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Bose Digital Radio.

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