Data Center
New 6.3 Meter Rooftop Antenna Update
In the spring of 2010 the SSEC Data Center installed a new 6.3 meter Patriot antenna to receive MTSAT, Polar, and NOAAPORT data relayed via a US DOMSAT. Unlike existing antennas currently in use by SSEC, this new antenna is heated. The contact heaters cover the bottom 2/3 of the antenna. So far this winter there has been one snow event that would have normally caused a data loss. The new antenna performed perfectly. No data was lost during this snow event.
The new antenna the morning after the snow event.
It is estimated that the new antenna prevented at least 3 hours of data loss the weekend of December 11, perhaps much more (see graph of antenna performance). Wet snow started between 23:00 UTC and 0:00 UTC..
The same wet snow event caused SSEC to lose 3+ hours of data due to snow accumulation in the unheated Orchard St antenna. The snow was removed with a snow rake from the unheated Orchard st dish starting at 8:30 pm Saturday (2:30 UTC), which restored the data to it by about 3:30 UTC. The new heated Patriot antenna did not lose any data during this period. The data outage on the rooftop Patriot antenna could have been much worse than 3 hours, since we would not have been able to clean out the antenna until Monday at the earliest.
