Lyngsat for Beginners

Matching Satellites and Orbital Positions on Lyngsat.com

To all Free to Air Satellite enthusiasts and Professional Satellite dish installers all over the world, lyngsat.com is a very important website to get useful information. In very simple English this tutorial I will teach you how lyngsat works and how to use it. Even Globecast, the international Telecommunications giant from France uses lyngsat. And now you will be a professional too thanks to the many illustrations. When you first visit www.lyngsat.com you will be greeted with the featured image above.

Now since I live in Kenya, I wrote this for people living specifically in the Sub-Saharan region of Africa. The place to go after this is to click where the row Satellites and column 73E – 0E meet, the Europe link. Notice that if you live in Sub-Sahara Africa the list of satellites receivable are mainly located in the Europe and Atlantic links on the Satellites row. So you can also click in the Atlantic link on the Satellites row instead of Europe. But for the purposes of this tutorial just go with Europe:-

The preceding paragraph assumes that you know your geography well. Satellite positions are named after the corresponding longitude line on earth. A Longitude is a geographic coordinate that tells us the east or west position of a point on the Earth from the prime meridian. It is an angular measurement and expressed in degrees.

All direct to home satellite TV satellites are parked into an orbit that corresponds to the equator back on earth. So aiming your dish from anywhere on earth is just but aiming on a projection of the equator in the sky.

After clicking on Europe this is what you will get. Notice that it now lists Europe, Africa and Middle East at the top.

Now there is a big list that starts from 72.1 deg East (Intelsat 22) to 1 deg East (BulgariaSat 1). My snip is a little bit short that is why you cant see BulgariaSat 1

but if you click on the link above you will get to see the whole website with all the satellites.

Now there are two bands of satellite TV frequencies namely C band and Ku band. If we read to the right of the first satellite at 72.1E you will see the satellite name which is Intelsat 22 and the right of it again you will see Cku which means that this satellite houses both C band and Ku band frequencies.

For another example the satellite at position 52.5E Al Yah 1 is a Ku Band satellite only.

Read more about the difference between C band and Ku Band satellite frequencies.

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Can you name the Dstv or Zuku satellite? I’ll give you a hint 36 deg East and 4.9 deg East respectively.

Answer of my earlier question. Can you name the Dstv or Zuku satellite? My hint of 36 deg East and 4.9 deg may have confused you since under the orbital positions 36E AND 4.9E there are a number of satellites. This is so because the satellites are close together that they are receivable one earth using a single satellite dish. The correct answers are Eutelsat 36B and SES5 respectively. Now if you click on the 36 deg East link, you will be directed to a list of all channels on the satellites Express AMU 1 and Eutelsat 36B. But if you choose to click on the individual satellite names then you will be directed to the individuals list of channels and providers.

Now trace the orbital position 7 deg East and click on it or the satellite name Eutelsat 7A. You will notice that there are two satellites here that share the same orbital position. This is not uncommon. You will get the following at the top will be the satellite name and Orbital Position.

Now let us go back and select the other satellite at that position which is Eutelsat 7B with receivable transponder frequency in most of Sub-Sahara Africa inclusive of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Congo, Malawi, Zambia e.t.c. The Transponder frequency is 11356 H 45000.

I bet you will see something similar to this with a few differences.

The only thing that has changes on the image above is the Beam location. Can you tell where it has moved to?

I think with the arrows everything has been explained. A good free to air satellite receiver will handle the rest (frequency, symbol rate, FEC rate and PIDs) provided your dish is pointed at that direction.