What are Sun Outages?
During certain times of the year for several minutes every day, energy from the sun can overpower a satellite’s signal. This is called a sun fade, sun transit or sun outage. Use PanAmSat sun outage calculator to estimate the times that your signal may be potentially degraded. Commercial communications satellites are geostationary and therefore have orbits that lie in the equatorial plane. During the spring and fall equinoxes, the sun also passes through this plane. As seen from the ground, the sun seems to pass behind the satellites once per day. During the time when both the satellite and the sun are in the ground station’s field of view, the energy from the sun can overpower the signal from the satellite. It is this loss or degradation of communications traffic from the satellite that is referred to as sun fade, sun transit or sun outage.
