Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Dodgy Satellite Stuff II

What the fork is an EsN0?

The techie on the phone was concerned when we talked. My satellite modem system had an EsN0 of 4.4 at that time. Apparently the maximum is 12, but it's supposed to be at least 6. He was concerned by my low EsN0. Very concerned.

I asked him exactly what an EsN0 might be. He couldn't say, exactly, but the fact that my EsN0 was so low concerned him. He was concerned, he told me.

I've just checked it again. My EsN0 is now down to 3.60. So -- I should be more concerned, right?

How concerned should I be? Is this just a generic sort of concern, or should I be stocking up on food and ammunition? Do I need to alert the authorities? Are there any bylaws or regulations regarding low EsN0 that I should be aware of?

I'm definitely concerned.

12 comments:

  1. A couple of shots of pennicillin and you'll be right. Unless you are allergic to pennicillin....

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  2. Google, which is never wrong, only misguided, suggest that esno is the European Specialist Nurses Organization. I think you need a remedial massage nurse from Portugal, a Nutritional Advice Nurse from France, and a naughty nurse specializing in pole dancing from Sweden.

    Of course, I then went and found out that esno was all about energy - symbol noise ratio. So I GUESS your dish isn't collecting enough energy for the decryption to be assured. A 640mb Compact disk has about 10Gb of info, but error correction and redundancies mean you can be 'assured' of 640Mb. Your signal will be really fat, but you get a fiftieth of the data received as it's all chewed up in checksums to ensure the data is right. I further speculate that the less energy you get the less the data can be assured, so It's got to send stuff over and over making transmissions even lower.

    "Hello - Did you get that"
    'no'
    "Hello - did you get that"
    'no'
    "Hello - did you get that"
    'Yeah, Hi, How are you'
    "Did you just greet me? Confirm"
    'Yes I did'

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  3. Having written simple one-off protocols alarmingly similar to what bart has just described, I can confirm it's really like that. Well sometimes. It depends on what you mean by "really". And "like".

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  4. "Your signal will be really fat"

    YsambartCourtin don't you mean your signal will be really phat.

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  5. Babe...you should always be concerned. Helpful not...amusing perhaps nil.

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  6. So... basically, we're talking about the computer equivalent of a knock-knock joke gone very badly wrong.

    Fuck this Internet shit. I'm going back to flashing mirror signals from hilltop to hilltop.

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  7. Hill 247 coming in. It's cold here.

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  8. With a low EsNO count you might start growing man-boobs.

    Seriously.

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  9. There is always a market. There is a fetish market for everything.

    And a friend of mine, who is from Mexico, assures me that when it comes to massage nurses, you want Chilean or Argentinean. You do NOT want a Mexican, unless you are actually IN Mexico.

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