Astra 5B

The Astra 5B satellite provided two Ku-band broadcast beams, each of horizontal and vertical polarisation, across two footprints, called the High Power beam and the Wide beam. • The High Power beam provides reception on a 50 cm dish in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Greece, Turkey and the Caucasus to the Black Sea. • The Wide beam enables reception on a 60 cm dish over the same area and in addition, the Baltic states and much of Eastern Russia. Within these reception areas, Astra 5B provided capacity for direct-to-home (DTH) broadcasting, direct-to-cable (DTC), and contribution feeds to digital terrestrial television networks. The satellite will also carry a hosted L-band payload for the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) as EGNOS GEO-2. == History ==

Astra 5B was ordered by SES in 2009 and built by Astrium (now Airbus Defence and Space) on the Eurostar-3000 satellite bus. but that launch was cancelled because the other satellite (Optus 10) which was due to accompany Astra 5B on the Ariane 5 launch was pulled from the manifest pending a possible sale of Optus. The launch was then planned for 6 December 2013 with Hispasat's Amazonas 4A satellite as the co-passenger, but it was announced in November 2013 that the launch had been postponed until January 2014 by delays to the availability of the Amazonas craft. Finally, Ariane 5 VA216 was launched on 22 March 2014. Astra 5B began commercial operation at the Astra 31.5°E position on 2 June 2014, and by the end of June 2014 had 18 active transponders carrying channels for eastern Europe. In July 2023 it was reported that all broadcasts had ceased and the satellite had moved to 23.5° East alongside Astra 3B. There, channels broadcasting on Astra 3B began to be transferred to Astra 5B (indicating a problem with Astra 3B, which still had some two years of its design life remaining) and Astra 5B was renamed Astra 3C. == See also ==