Satellite Spectrum Interference & Congestion: Operator Field Guide
A practical playbook for RF engineers and NOC teams to understand, diagnose, and respond to satellite spectrum interference and congestion—before it erodes SLAs and revenue.
Satellite services share a finite and increasingly crowded RF environment. As more satellites, ground terminals, and terrestrial systems come online, interference and congestion are no longer edge cases—they are day-to-day operational risks. Most problems are unintentional: adjacent-satellite interference from tight GEO spacing and small dishes, misaligned polarization, uplink overpower, 5G and radar encroachment, and confusion between rain fade and man-made interference.
The geostationary arc is crowded, with satellites separated by just a few degrees. Small dishes are attractive for cost but their wide beams see multiple satellites at once. Mobile terminals are proliferating while installation quality varies. C-band is being shared with 5G, and strong terrestrial signals can overload satellite receivers even without perfect in-band overlap. Weather-driven fading at Ku and Ka complicates diagnosis further—NOC teams often blame rain when the real problem is interference, or vice versa. The business stakes are rising: tighter SLAs, more capacity per satellite, and multi-million-dollar mitigation costs make interference a line item on the P&L.
This field guide gives your team diagnostic patterns and SOPs so that the next time "the link is bad," you can quickly answer: Is it fade, interference, congestion, or configuration?—and act accordingly. The articles below each focus on a specific interference scenario your team will encounter. Start with the operator playbook for a quick-reference index of all six common scenarios, or jump directly to the topic most relevant to your current situation.