Just a reminder that in about 10 days or so, depending on your latitude, most people in the northern latitudes will be coming into the sun outage period. This typically starts about 2 weeks after the fall equinox and about 3 weeks before the spring equinox.
Look up your declination in the
Sadoun declination calculator, which is the declination for a southern sat, and the declination for an eastern or western sat will be about a half degree less than that. On Oct 4th, the sun will have a declination of about 4.5 degrees, which should be in the range of what people down south will have for declinations, and by Oct 11th or so, the sun's declination will progress to nearly 7 degrees (these are negative angles), which will correspond to declinations for people up north.
See
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/geocentric.html to get the actual sun declinations.
Anyway, this period in early October is always an interesting period, where you can visually see where the Clarke belt actually is. For people with prime focus dishes, you can see the shadow of the feedhorn go across the center of the dish. For people with offset dishes, you can get a feeling for where these silly dishes are actually
aiming, which isn't always obvious.
For people like me, who live in the woods, it's always a time of year when I go out to my dish, and see what tree limbs might be cut to give me some holes that my dish can see through to improve reception on certain sats. Initially, I was able to keep up with these darn trees by using one of those rope saws, ie a chain saw on a rope that you throw over limbs. I was getting pretty good at using a sling shot to send a fishing line over limbs, then pulling up the rope saw, and cutting off limbs that were up 50' in the air, however the last few years, it's gotten a bit out of control, and I'm not sure I can deal with the problem anymore without cutting entire trees down.
Anyway, the most interesting time of the year for TVRO'ers is coming up in a couple weeks.
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