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Solar Outages

A solar or sun transit out is an electromagnetic phenomenon wherein a station downlink is temporarily unable to receive a satellite signal due to interference from the sun as it passes behind the satellite.

Solar outages occur on a predictable schedule and affect downlinks in the U.S. for about ten consecutive days, for as much as six minutes a day, twice each year. To obtain solar outage information for your location, click on your state or territory in the pull-down menu below. Clicking on "Any" will provide dates and times for all locations.

Solar Outage Rules

* All times ET

Finding Your PRSS Account Representative

Not sure who your PRSS account representative is? Click on your state or territory in the drop-down menu below to get the name of your rep.

Help Desk

Technical support is available 24/7. Please contact the PRSS Help Desk at 800.971.7677 or via email: prsshelp@npr.org

MAPS

MAPS, a free service from NPR Labs, provides signal coverage maps for all public radio and television stations across America, and includes demographic information mapped to a station's coverage area.

Go to NPR Labs MAPS

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Solar Outage Rules

The following rules apply to all solar outages:

The dates listed on prss.org are those for which the solar disk will be within the beam pattern of your receive antenna and are given for the center of the state in most cases. On these days you will see a definite reduction in performance as the sun passes. All stations will see a reduction of Eb/No readings on the digital audio channels. If a downlink has enough margin, there will be no effect on the audio. If the downlink does not have enough margin, audio may be lost for up to several minutes. Stations with marginal downlinks may see some degradation one day before or one day after the days listed.

The dates and times listed are for the peak of the interference. Depending on the size of your antenna, the interference may begin up to four minutes before this time and last up to four minutes after it. The interference will be longer on days in the center of the range. There will also be dates, both before and after peak interference predictions, where you will experience noticeable reduction of Eb/No readings.

The times are given in NPR network time, which is Eastern Time.

These predictions are based on a leap year (366 days). The variations from year to year are so small that separate predictions for each year are not necessary.