Sunday, October 23, 2011

Satellite Radio - What Is It and Why You Need It?

By Daleim Nust


The invention of radio was a landmark in the world of broadcasting. In today's digital age, satellite radio has ushered in a new era of radio communications. This type of radio has revolutionized the industry and changed the way that people listen to the airways.

It works by sending a digital radio signal to a communications satellite. As a result, satellite covers a wider area than traditional radio signals, which typically span only 30 to 40 miles from their source. In contrast, satellite transmits its signal more than 20,000 miles away from its source. The quality of satellite radio broadcasts is also superior to that of terrestrial radio, since the signal is digital.

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 allows ten minutes every hour for the news and then the sequence can be repeated automatically.

Satellite transmission 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 extremely quickly, in fact in what is called 'real time'.

Much like satellite television, subscribers pay a fee to obtain satellite services from their car or from their home. They must also purchase a receiver in order to gain access to satellite radio channels.

In America, for instance, the two areas 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 entirety of the United States in that orbit.

So these are a few of the advantages that satellite radio has over conventional radio. To those that argue that the subscription costs money and conventional radio is free, I say this: Think of all the time you spend listening to commercials and scanning the dial for something you like and you will find that inexpensive cost of a subscription well worth the price.




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