LOW TECH, HIGH ANXIETY

If you take the Federal Highway from the city and head towards Subang/Shah Alam, you will notice a Media Prima billboard just before the Amcorp Mall turnoff. It will tell you that you can watch their TV programs "come Rain or Shine". I thought that this is a very clever tagline.

If you are an ASTRO subscriber like me, you would have suffered viewes interruptus countless times in the past and most likely to suffer so in the future. You sit in front of your TV (plasma, LCD or plain CRT) watching an interesting program and suddenly the screen breaks up into incoherent pixels and the sounds of irritated mice chit-chitting you from your sound system. Then, if you are lucky, you have the program back for a few minutes before it gets interrupted again. You poke your neck out to see if it is raining. Nope. Not even "rain to chase old farts" (Hujang hambat orang tua). ASTRO called this interruption "Rain Fade", common to the Ku-Band system. I wonder what system NASA used on Galileo and Mariner space probes. I wonder too if my daughter in Saudi Arabia, where it seldom rain and the capital never gets flooded has this problem.

So looks like I have to spend money for a technician to check and/or align my dish. This is after switching my system off and on as earlier advised by ASTRO in their old copies of Astro Guide. I will be paying more for my subscription already. Now I have to choose between giving up all the interesting new programs on ASTRO and going back to terrestrial TV. In the mean time when I miss a crucial part of the program I can choose to sigh and accept the inadequacies of our technology or just invoke a curse on those responsible to have their body hairs infected by the fleas of a thousand camels.

Labels: ASTRO, rain fade