Nilesat 7°W Transponder Reference: Every Frequency in Our Channel List

Most frequency lists are organised by channel, which is the right shape when you already know what you are looking for. This page is organised the other way round: by transponder, the actual carrier that a receiver locks onto.

Our channel list currently covers 32 transponders carrying 421 named services at 7° west. Every value below is taken from that list rather than retyped, so this table and the individual channel pages can never disagree with each other.

Why the transponder view is worth having

A receiver does not tune to a channel. It tunes to a transponder, locks the carrier, then demultiplexes the services inside it. That is why a single alignment problem takes out a whole block of channels at once, and why one dead transponder never affects the rest of the list.

Read this way, the table answers questions a channel-ordered list cannot. Which frequencies share a symbol rate. Which need the low band. Which carry twenty services and which carry four. If you are doing a manual scan rather than a blind scan, this is the sheet you work from.

The full transponder list

Sorted by frequency. The last column counts the named services our list currently holds on each carrier — not the theoretical capacity of the transponder.

What the layout tells you

One symbol rate dominates

Most of these carriers run at 27500 with 5/6 error correction. That combination is the regional house standard, and it is why a receiver whose manual-scan defaults are set to 27500 5/6 will find the majority of the list without any adjustment at all.

The exceptions are worth knowing individually rather than as a group:

• 30000 3/4 appears on four carriers, and every one of them is horizontally polarised. These are wider carriers than the rest of the list.
• 27500 3/4 appears on four carriers, mixing both polarisations.
• 27500 2/3 appears on exactly one carrier — the heaviest error-correction ratio in the whole list.

FEC is the trade-off between capacity and robustness. A 5/6 ratio spends one bit in six on error correction; 2/3 spends one in three. The lower ratio carries fewer services but survives a worse signal, which is why the same dish can hold a 2/3 carrier through rain that has already broken a 5/6 one.

Three carriers sit in the low band

This is the single most useful thing in the table for anyone whose scan came back half empty. Three frequencies fall below 11700 MHz, which puts them in the LNB's low band using the 9750 MHz local oscillator. Everything else is high band, on 10600 MHz.

A universal LNB switches between the two when the receiver sends a 22 kHz tone. If that tone never arrives — a cheap switch in the path, a marginal cable, or a satellite entry configured with a single oscillator value — the receiver finds one band perfectly and behaves as though the other does not exist. The symptom looks like a missing satellite. The cause is one setting.

Service counts are uneven by design

Carriers are leased and filled independently, so a dense transponder and a nearly empty one sit side by side with no relationship between them. A carrier holding a single named service in our list is not broken; it is either lightly used or carrying services we have not identified yet.

Using this for a manual scan

1. Confirm the satellite entry has the right oscillator pair, 9750 and 10600, before anything else.
2. Pick a dense carrier from the table to align on — a strong, well-filled transponder gives a clearer quality reading than a sparse one.
3. Add carriers one at a time, checking the lock before scanning. A carrier that will not lock is a data or aim problem; scanning it harder will not help.
4. If a whole polarisation is missing, look at voltage, not aim. Horizontal needs 18 V and fails first on a marginal run.

Operators move services between carriers without notice. Treat this table as the state of our list rather than a permanent map, and re-run a blind scan if something you expect is not where it should be.