Speedcast

Speedcast
2008 20103D

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COMPANY REPORT

Satellite Uplink Speedcast, Barueri, SP, Brazil

Seven Uplink Dishes and Many, Many Reception Antennas

Modern and very organized is the impression you get from the Speedcast uplink station in Barueri west of Sao Paulo. With seven large dishes (well talk more about them later) and numerous other smaller and larger dishes used just for reception, Speedcast is one of the largest in Brazil. The companys customers include among others the TV channels Rede TV and SBT. Speedcast is particularly proud of being the first company to uplink an HDTV signal in Brazil that was 2008 for Rede TV and TV Bandeirantes. Henrique Antonini is one of the broadcast technicians at Speedcast and tells us more about the company: Speedcast was founded in 2003 by Alfonso Aurin and Luciano Esteves. Both of them are engineers and Alfonso Aurin was for many years Technical Manager at SBT, a TV channel that was founded in 1981 whose headquarters is located in Oscasco, the next town over from Barueri. But the initial

Barueri, SP

Satellite TV uplink operator

Speedcast can be found in this modern office complex in Barueri near Sao Paulo

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1. In a conference room broadcast technicians are displaying on three monitors the live pictures that are being uplinked by Speedcast: RedeTV HD (left monitor), SBT (center monitor) and the still image of Business TV (upper monitor) with a programming note regarding an upcoming broadcast from Volkswagen 2. A look in the small live studio. Business TV programs are produced here. At the moment theres a broadcast going on for Volkswagen

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services provided by Speedcast in 2003 were not TV uplinks, it was VSAT services. That radically changed in 2005: Speedcast completely eliminated VSAT and switched entirely over to TV uplink. The first uplink dish was our 9.0-meter antenna that is still in operation today. Additional dishes followed soon after that; a 7.3-meter dish was erected

and over the years four more 3.6-meter uplink antennas and one at 4.5-meters were placed into service. All of these uplink dishes are used not only for regular TV channels, but also for Business TV. Their most prominent customer is Volkswagen; they regularly keep their employees informed at specific times. We even have our own small studio here in

which these Business TV programs are produced. Other Business TV customers include NCR, PanAmerican Bank, Johnson Batteries and the Business TV service TV Oficina Brasil. In 2007 Speedcast went into cooperation with EUTELSAT. Since then Speedcast has been operating EUTELSATs monitoring station for South America.

Henrique Antonio explains to us how that works: The EUTELSAT technicians can access our system directly from their headquarters in Paris and can thus keep a real-time eye on the signals. In the same year 2007, Speedcast also expanded their technology and since then have been able to process all broadcasts in 16:9. The upgrade to 3D came

in 2010. Today there are a total of 34 employees at Speedcast, 15 of them are at their headquarters while the rest are field technicians working with customers. In just ten years Speedcast has made quite a name for itself in the TV uplink field. In Brazil the company is one of the first names you come across in this field.

The dishes in the foreground are

reserved for EUTELSAT. Technicians at EUTELSATs headquarters in Paris can remotely control these antennas allowing them to keep an eye on transmissions from the EUTELSAT satellites

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 A Speedcast technician is

checking on the positioning of the 9.0-meter dish that is fixed on STARONE C1 at 65W. The smaller 7.3-meter dish behind it is fixed on STARONE C2 at 70W

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 A look in the video control room.

Video signals that arrive here from the TV channels studios via fiber-optic cable are monitored as is the transmitted signal

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1. In the heart of the system: here youll find the 19 racks of the actual transmitters 2. Large dishes, because of their extremely small aperture angle, constantly need position adjustments. This is taken care of by this controller. The set points for optimum reception have been predetermined and with the aid of a beacon receiver the position of the 9.0-meter antenna can be kept perfect 3. The signals via fiber-optic cable land here: Speedcast takes the Rede TV and SBT signals and uplinks them to the STARONE satellite 4. This rack is reserved for EUTELSAT: this is where the dishes reserved for EUTELSAT are remotely controlled. Speedcast only makes the space available; all of the work is handled remotely from the EUTELSAT headquarters in Paris. A small web camera is pointed at this rack so that technicians in Paris can actually see whats going on and advise when something needs to be changed.

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1. TV Aparecida is another channel carried by Speedcast. Its signal is received via satellite in this rack and then retransmitted 2. The broadcasted signal can be viewed in the broadcasting room at the same time. The individual reception antennas can be connected here and the spectrum analyzer is used to monitor the signal. The monitor above shows the corresponding TV picture 3. A mosaic monitor shows all of Speedcasts broadcasted channels

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