2. ëBarueri, SP
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216 TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 09-10/2013 — www.TELE-audiovision.com
Seven Uplink Dishes
and Many, Many
Reception Antennas
Satellite TV uplink operator
Speedcast can be found in this
modern office complex in Barueri
near Sao Paulo
Modern and very organized is the im-
pression you get from the Speedcast up-
link station in Barueri west of Sao Paulo.
With seven large dishes (we’ll talk more
about them later) and numerous other
smaller and larger dishes used just for
reception, Speedcast is one of the larg-
est in Brazil. The company’s customers
include among others the TV channels
Rede TV and SBT.
Speedcast is particularly proud of be-
ing 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 techni-
cians at Speedcast and tells
us more about the company:
“Speedcast was founded in 2003
by Alfonso Aurin and Luciano Es-
teves.” 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 head-
quarters is located in Oscasco, the next
town over from Barueri. But the initial
COMPANY REPORT Satellite Uplink Speedcast, Barueri, SP, Brazil
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218 TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 09-10/2013 — www.TELE-audiovision.com
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 there’s
a broadcast going on for
Volkswagen
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services provided by Speedcast in 2003
were not TV uplinks, it was VSAT ser-
vices. That radically changed in 2005:
Speedcast completely eliminated VSAT
and switched entirely over to TV uplink.
“The first uplink dish was our 9.0-me-
ter antenna that is still in operation to-
day.” 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 up-
link dishes are used not only for regular
TV channels, but also for Business TV.
Their most prominent customer is Volk-
swagen; they regularly keep their em-
ployees informed at specific times. “We
even have our own small studio here in
which these Business TV programs are
produced.” Other Business TV custom-
ers include NCR, PanAmerican Bank,
Johnson Batteries and the Business TV
service TV Oficina Brasil.
In 2007 Speedcast went into coopera-
tion with EUTELSAT. Since then Speed-
cast has been operating EUTELSAT’s
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 ex-
panded their technology and since then
have been able to process all broad-
casts 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 custom-
ers. 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 EUTELSAT’s headquarters in
Paris can remotely control these
antennas allowing them to keep
an eye on transmissions from the
EUTELSAT satellites
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222 TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 09-10/2013 — www.TELE-audiovision.com
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 channel’s studios via
fiber-optic cable are monitored as
is the transmitted signal
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2
3
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1. In the heart of the system: here you’ll 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 what’s going on and advise when something needs to be
changed.
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228 TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 09-10/2013 — www.TELE-audiovision.com
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 Speedcast’s broadcasted
channels
