Although it’s not classic hotel TV, still it needs mentioning, because hotel guests or barge crews on the Danube also like to watch TV during their rest. Not to mention the passengers on yachts on the waves.
Usually, if you need something for a boat, it’s always a little different, always a little more expensive, always a little more special than normal.
So it is with satellite reception.
Parabolic antennas on rooftops ideally need only to be set up once, and then they will do their job for years, decades. It’s easy to see that on a boat the situation is more complicated, because if the boat moves or the water is very rough, reception is lost.
There is, of course, a solution to this problem. Under the ‘dome’ you see on boats, there is a fast-moving satellite dish, a real engineering marvel. The movement of the antenna, caused by waves or the movement of the boat, is detected by a gyroscope system and signals the antenna control unit how to move the antenna. If the antenna control unit is also capable of so-called “beam shoulder management”, reception on fast boats will be perfect even in high waves.
These antennas are extremely durable devices, and rarely break. Most of the time, we encounter them when we need to reprogram or change the devices connected to them.
There are several vessels sailing the Danube and the Adriatic see on which we have upgraded or serviced the satellite system.