Why Standard Group TV, Radio Stations Might Go Off Air For One Week
In a statement, the Mombasa Road-based media house denied any possible blame regarding themselves triggering the interferences, rather revealing that it was the sun that was to blame.
Marvin Chege 
The Standard Group Limited on Wednesday, September 20 cautioned its viewers and listeners regarding temporary signal interruptions that might affect their normal listening to the radio and watching TV for one week.
The media house runs KTN News, KTN Home, Farmers TV and Burudani TV. Its radio stations are Radio Maisha, Vybez Radio and Spice FM.
In a statement, the Mombasa Road-based media house denied any possible blame regarding themselves triggering the interferences, rather revealing that it was the sun that was to blame.
The disruptions on your favourite shows will therefore be a result of the sun aligning itself behind communication satellites and its radiation overpowering the satellite's signals, what is called a 'sun outage'.
An image of a satellite in space. /MIDTEL
"We wish to inform our dear listeners and viewers that we will be experiencing periodic signal interruptions during the day between September 20th and 27th affecting our radio and TV transmission.
"This is due to Satellite Sun Outage- a rare global phenomenon, that can last for up to 10 minutes every day," Standard Group explained in part.
Notably, Standard Group reiterated that its TV and radio stations would still be on air, even though the degree of interference could vary from slight signal degradation to a complete loss.
On Tuesday, the satellites that enable the company to air its programmes suffered the effects of the sunspot, leading to the outage. This, however, reportedly lasted for five hours as the services were later restored.
This year, the sun outage season began in September and will continue into October. During this period, depending on geographical location, service on satellite downlinks may experience a brief disturbance due to interference from the sun when it falls directly behind a satellite.
What Is A Sun Outage?
A sun outage (also known as sun interference or sun fade) is interference caused by the sun and it occurs when the receiving earth station, the satellite and the sun are aligned. This situation is called the conjunction of the sun and the satellite.
During conjunction, since the sun is a giant source of radiation, the antenna noise temperature increases, decreasing the link performance. Depending on the receive antenna size, its efficiency and the frequency band used, this interference can cause degradation of the satellite signal and a service outage.
Sun interference occurs for several minutes. The actual timing, the duration of the interference, and the level of service degradation vary depending on the location of the receiving earth station, the size of the antenna, the received frequency and the link margin.
The temporary interferences at Standard Group Limited come as the media house is still witnessing financial challenges, with the uncertainty, coupled with internal memos threatening mass firings at the century-old media house, unsettling journalists regarding their future at Standard Group.
