(April 4, 2017) – The five U.S. commercial radio networks who operate their own satellite systems have been up and running on the new AMC-18 at 105 degrees West Longitude for over a month. Affiliates must move their downlinks to the 105 West position before service on the old AMC-8 ends on June 30.
The five networks – Learfield, Orbital Media Networks (OMNi), Premiere Networks, Skyview Networks, and Westwood One – have their full complements of satellite-delivered programming available on their new frequencies on AMC-18. This includes all show titles, satellite channels, contact closures, PAD data, cue messages and file-delivery channels – the same ones you are familiar with from AMC-8.
It also includes programming from syndicators who lease their satellite time from these five companies. To ease the transition, each network has programmed a Fallback Carrier into a table in each receiver’s memory. This allows each receiver (whether XDS or Wegener) to find the correct new carrier on AMC-18. Once a receiver loses lock on the old signal on AMC-8 (because you’ve pointed away from 139 West), it will alternately search for the “old” and “new” frequencies for that network until it locks to one. When your dish is successfully pointed to 105 West (and polarized!), your receiver(s) should lock to the “new” signal within 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
Note: Kalipso receivers do not have a fallback carrier table and must be set to the new frequency from the front panel.
If your affiliate downlink antenna (dish) is in too poor condition to be repointed or is not 2-degree compliant – which enables downlinks to reject interference from adjacent satellites – you are strongly urged to consider replacing it with a new one of 3.7 meters or larger. Although the networks do not endorse any particular vendors, many of them appear on this list.
Questions:
Learfield: 573-893-1955 or e-mail Randy Williams
Orbital Media Networks (OMNi): 303-925-1708 option 1, or e-mail
Skyview Networks: 877-503- 8910 or e-mail
Premiere Networks: 818-461-8373 or e-mail
Westwood One: 888-HELP-450 (888-435- 7450)
Wegener- or STORQ-delivered programming, press option 1, then option 2, or e-mail
XDS-delivered programming, press option 1, then option 4, or e-mail
General questions: e-mail
Information Courtesy of Skyview Networks.