As of 1st June, the EBU is putting into service a new earth
station on the roof of its headquarters in Geneva.
This earth station will be used to uplink Eurovision and
Euroradio services to the W3 satellite at 7°E.
The Swisscom-owned Vernier earth station, which was used until
recently to carry these services, will be shut down at the end of
May.
Engineering design of the new earth station was carried out by
EBU staff, and an equipment requirement and work specification was
issued for tender in August 2002, followed by a contract for the
work in October.
The system comprises of a 4.8-metre antenna with step track and
full de-icing. A policy of 1 for 2 redundancy was adopted for both
transmit and receive chains.
The transmit chains comprise of two 350-watt linearized
travelling-wave tube amplifiers, one for each transmitted
polarization, with a single 100-watt solid-state amplifier as a
reserve.
The receive chains cover the full band 10950 MHz to 12750 MHz
and use wideband low noise amplifiers followed by separate block
converters for the upper and lower part of the band.
Apart from reducing operating cost, the advantages of the EBU
operating its own earth station are:
faster restoration in the event of equipment
breakdowns or the necessity to transfer to the back-up satellite in
the event of the failure of the main satellite at 7°E;
maintenance quality and hence reliability
under the direct control of the EBU;
cheaper and quicker introduction of new
services.
