Yes, you are seeing double, actually. Quite a few boats here at the show are sporting not just dual-dome installs but dual TracVision installs. Why would someone need two satellite TV systems you ask? Well, there's the technical answer and the easy answer so pull up a chair and pay attention…there will be a test later.
Because a house isn’t moving and the angles from the house to the satellites always remains the same, a home satellite TV dish is able to look at one, two, or even three satellites at once, with the signals from each being reflected to a different low noise block (LNB) from which the signal is relayed to the various receivers inside the home. This allows folks to watch different channels being broadcast by different satellites (HDTV and standard programming, for example).
However, a satellite TV system on a moving platform is only able to look at one satellite at a time because it is constantly shifting its position to stay locked onto the satellite as the vessel or vehicle is moving. As a result, with one antenna, you can watch as many different channels as you wish provided there’s a receiver for every television AND all of the channels are being broadcast by the same satellite.
Now if you and your passengers want to watch CNN, ESPN, Cartoon Network, and HBO at the same time, that’s no problem since they’re all broadcast from the same bird (using DIRECTV as example, that would be the satellite at 101˚W). But what if you really wanted to watch Monday Night Football on ESPN’s high-definition channel (broadcast on DIRECTV 110˚W) and your buddy is the president of the Peter Weller Fan Club and can’t miss a showing of “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension” on the Sci-Fi Channel (DIRECTV 101˚W)?
Well, then you’ll either have to flip a coin to see which satellite you are going to track OR you do what these intrepid boat owners do and get two TracVision domes. (Or you just channel surf and flip from the 110 bird to the 101 bird and back again during commercial breaks or time-outs. With the new TracVision M-series, you can do that simply by changing the channel using the remote control! Sweet!)
Of course, that's the technical answer. The easy answer...boat owners want their boats to look as balanced as possible so it's perfectly likely that some of them have bought empty "dummy" domes to install and balance out the install of the real TracVision system. As a bonus to KVH, the technical support needed for dummy domes is minimal!
