If you are a cable TV customer in the territory and your picture goes bad for a few minutes each day over the next month while watching your favorite show, don’t bother calling the station. It’s the sun’s fault.
Because of "sun outages," Innovative Cable TV St. Croix and Innovative Cable TV St. Thomas-St. John customers will experience temporary service interruptions. Sun outage, which is also called sun fade and sun transit, occurs when the sun aligns behind an orbiting satellite for a few minutes each day, according to Innovative Communication Corp. When this occurs, the radio frequency energy from the sun can overpower the signal from the satellite, causing the loss of programming.
Both cable companies have received notices from programmers that the spring sun outage period will occur over the next 30 days.
"Sun outage activity is standard, and it occurs twice a year in the spring and fall," said Adrian LaBennett, general manager of the St. Croix cable system. "Customers will notice that the sun outages affect different satellites at different times, which means that channels will be affected at various times in the late afternoon and early evening hours."
Due to the many differences in ground station equipment, some stations may experience a complete loss of signal while others may only experience a tolerable degradation of signal. According to Andrea Martin, general manager of St. Thomas-St. John Cable TV, the process locally can take five to 15 minutes.
Viewers will likely see a slight graininess to their channels that will gradually become worse. At some point in the sun outage the channel picture will disappear completely and then gradually return.
