The satellites which broadcast satellite television signals to homes and businesses are essentially orbital repeating stations. A transponder on a television satellite receives a television signal beamed from large satellite uplink stations on the ground, then processes, encodes, amplifies and rebroadcasts the signal over a large area of the Earth’s surface. There, it is picked up by small satellite receivers and transmitted to a digital receiver in the customer’s living room, where it is decoded and displayed on a connected television screen.
