What’s The Impact of Weather on Cable TV?

Television doesn’t get affected by weather as much as it used to back in the analog days. However, thunderstorms or any severe condition can affect it a bit – as the fluctuation in signals happens, due to wind and moving trees. Thus, the TV signals can be disturbed by some weather conditions and in such situations, the only option available is, ‘to wait’ – you cannot do anything except wait – wait for the weather to be normal again. Also, don’t go for tuning TV in such scenarios, just to be safe. You can inform the customer service department as well, so if there is any technical issue post unfavorable weather, they can fix that and assist you whatever the scenario may be according to their professional assessments using their advanced technical expertise.

Well, when it comes to Cable TV particularly – it operates through copper wires or fiber-optic technology, which means the broadcast comes from the broadcaster directly through the wire – no chances of signal loss here. Yet again, in such situations the only thing to do is to wait – nothing else can be done promptly to get everything back on trial. In case the services are affected, which is not very common, predominantly, if you have subscribed to Spectrum TV plans or the such – some of the best cable TV service providers hold the reputation of providing unaffected services regardless of unfavorable weather or other challenging situations that may have had potentially caused interruption for their customers. The transmitter network of TV is engineered so well that the weather cannot affect it at large – minor inconvenience can be expected – but that is also rare. However, sometimes the signal moves further than usual in some challenging weather conditions which results in pixelation. There is little that can be accomplished when such things happen – so wait until the weather system has passed on and comes back to normal.

Usually, only those homes which have aerials with a direct line-of-sight to the transmitter will receive the signaling by each transmitter. Getting permitted to use the same frequency to obtain more than one signal will cause issues such as pixelation. This is regarded as interfering with the co-channel which may be attributed to a weather phenomenon called tropospheric ducting. You should research more about the tropospheric ducting guide for in-depth detail.

For the television relays in our transmission network that receive their signal from another transmission, this may also take place.

 

What can we do?

In case of any kind of interruption or system getting down, which is rare if you are using cable services but still one should know how to handle the situations that seldom take place. We have no effect on irregular dissemination across the troposphere since we may not monitor the setting, and it is only realistic to design a network where no more than 1 percent of the time interruption is experienced. Broadcasters will need to significantly expand the number of transmitters and create a much denser network to rely on this statistic. This is unrealistic and will be costly.

Tropospheric-type intervention, sadly, is never been widely distributed over the year. Usually, in the evenings, it appears to happen when TV viewing is at its highest, and specialist FM services are on air. Sometimes on different days, it occurs at the same time and disappears over several months. Depending on the prevalent weather conditions, certain years are worse than others. However, when calculated over many years, for at least 99 percent of the time, the majority of audiences and FM audiences should also be free from this form of interference, given that they remain within the coverage area of their transmitter and have a strong directional antenna.

There is nothing at all that can be done in such a scenario, except to wait until the environmental conditions improve. When this arises, you shouldn’t be considering re-tuning your TV.

 

Wrapping up

As mentioned quite a few times earlier in the discussion above, the weather does not affect cable services because wires are made of metal and the entire infrastructure is designed to stay under the floor and walls. This makes the entire system unbearable and unaffected. However, natural occurrences are not in anyone’s control which is why we shed some light on how to handle the situation if (ever)the weather affects the services for a while.