SatIndex Daily Transponder Scan Database

A German scanning operation whose full name - Satelliten, Sender und Frequenzen, satellites, channels and frequencies - is also an accurate table of contents. It scans several European satellite positions every day and publishes what it finds as two nested layers: the transponder, then the channels riding it. The current state of the scans counts 17 satellites and 8,621 channels - 7,043 TV services, of which 2,871 broadcast in HD, split between 1,640 free-to-air and 5,403 encrypted.

The two flagship positions carry the weight: Astra 19.2°E with 894 programmes and Hotbird 13°E with roughly 1,200, the two orbital slots most European dish owners can receive with a fixed installation. Fifteen further satellites get their own sections, alongside Pay-TV provider pages and country views.

Beyond the tables the operation runs tooling that most channel directories do not bother with: a Sender Sonar, a PID scanner, live blindscans, channel screenshots, a feed ticker of new and discontinued channels, and a nightly automated AI scan layered on top of the daily human-driven passes.

It scores 7 out of 10 on Datadory's quality rubric, with field definitions verified against delivered rows rather than inferred.

Get a sample of this dataset cut to your satellites, transponders or channels.

One row per channel per transponder, keyed by service identifiers and stamped with the date of the last scan that touched it. Four straight from the channel tables:

Sender       : Arena Premium 1
SID          : 1451
Video PID    : 251
Audio PID    : 3511
PMT PID      : 151
Update       : 03.04.2025

Sender       : Arena Sport 1
SID          : 1455
Video PID    : 255
Audio PID    : 3551
PMT PID      : 155
Update       : 18.06.2026

Sender       : HBO HD
SID          : 1454
Video PID    : 254
Audio PID    : 3541 | eng 3545
PMT PID      : 154
Update       : 01.07.2024

Sender       : N1 HD   Kategorie: Nachrichten
SID          : 1466
Video PID    : 266
Audio PID    : 3661 | srp
PMT PID      : 166
Update       : 01.07.2024

Four rows, four things worth noticing. The identifier spine - SID, video PID, audio PID, PMT PID - means a channel keys into a demultiplexer configuration or your own title database without fuzzy matching; HBO HD resolves to exactly one service at SID 1454. Audio PIDs arrive with ISO language tags (3541 | eng, 3661 | srp), so multilingual tracks are separable at parse time rather than guessed from channel names. Category arrives in German (Nachrichten = news) because the source interface is entirely German - a translation pass is part of any pipeline built on it. And the Update stamps span more than two years across these four rows alone, which tells you the honest thing about this data: freshness is per channel, not global.

Nineteen documented fields in two groups. The carrier group describes the transponder itself: frequency, polarization, symbol rate, FEC, modulation, roll-off factor, transmission standard, network name, TSID, measured bandwidth and beam. The service group describes each channel on that carrier: channel name, encryption status, country and category, the four identifiers (SID, video PID, audio PID, PMT PID), the teletext PID, and the update stamp. Every definition below was verified against a worked example - one real frequency page pins a DVB-S2 8PSK carrier at 11,679 MHz vertical, 30,000 kS/s, FEC 3/4, roll-off 0.20, network "Total TV Network", TSID 30204, carrying a measured 66.85 Mbit/s on beam 1P.

Additional fields on request. Signal level readings sit alongside bandwidth on the frequency pages, and the change-log side of the operation - new and discontinued channels, changed PIDs, encryption flips, resolution changes - can be shaped into a delta feed keyed on the same identifiers. Each gets defined and exemplified against delivered records before your schema locks.

• Geo: Seventeen European satellite positions, anchored on Astra 19.2°E and Hotbird 13°E - the two slots a fixed European dish actually sees - with fifteen further positions in dedicated sections. Channel entries themselves span many countries, tagged per row.
• Temporal: A rolling current-state snapshot, re-scanned daily with an automated AI pass running nightly on top. Every channel row carries its own dated update stamp, so the age of any single record is explicit - sample rows run from 2024 to June 2026. There is no historical archive behind the current state; longitudinal depth accrues from repeated deliveries at your cadence, not from the source holding history.
• Granularity: One row per channel per transponder per satellite, grouped under the frequency page that carries the carrier-level parameters. The finest cut is the individual PID; the coarsest useful frame is the whole orbital position.

That shape is the pitch. Most channel lists tell you a channel exists; this one tells you which carrier it rides, at what symbol rate, encrypted how, and when the scan last confirmed it.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Cadence should follow the decision being fed. Monitoring a competitor's lineup moves wants the fastest tick you can justify - new and discontinued channels surface within a day of the scan that caught them, and being late to an encryption flip or a channel exit is the same as not knowing. Building a receiver or headend configuration takes a different shape: a full backfill of the positions you serve, then quiet increments keyed on SID so nothing drifts. Research on the European broadcast market usually wants a pinned snapshot, so a chart built today reproduces next quarter.

Because every row carries its own identifiers and update date, incremental pulls key cleanly - yesterday's HBO HD at SID 1454 and today's are joinable without deduplication logic. The sample comes first: name the satellites, transponders or channels you care about, and real rows come back cut to that scope before anything reaches production.

• Competitive intelligence and product teams watch lineup exits and encryption changes land within a day of the scan that caught them - a pay-TV operator losing a marquee channel, or gaining one, shows up here before it shows up in a press release. Patterns collected under competitive intel product teams use cases.
• Data scientists and ML engineers train models on the structured residue of the dial: encryption flags against channel categories, HD adoption curves by country, PID-level fingerprints for automatic channel identification. See data scientists use cases.
• Developers and data-product builders need receiver, app and EPG configurations keyed to real multiplexes - the identifier spine is exactly what a demux setup consumes. Workflows collected under developers builders use cases.
• Journalists, academics and students cite the current European satellite lineup with per-channel evidence rather than an aggregate claim, and the dated update stamps make any citation auditable.

The fit has edges: this record measures the broadcast layer, not the business layer. Revenue, subscriber and pricing questions belong to other datasets; sales-growth teams will find no prospecting signal in a transponder table.

Three notes before you request a sample. First, freshness is per row: there is no single "as of" date for the whole database, so if your use case needs uniform recency, scope the sample to the channels where the update stamps are recent and let the rest age visibly rather than silently. Second, the interface is German throughout - channel names are proper nouns but categories, statuses and section labels are not, so budget for a translation mapping in the pipeline. Third, it documents the carrier and the service, not the fleet: pair it with an orbital-side dataset when the question needs both layers.

Notes and neighbors that pair well with this page:

• The cable & satellite data hub collects all six datasets in the industry, this one included.
• Orbital frame: SatBeams Satellite Coverage & Channel Database covers 500+ geostationary assets with EIRP footprints and dish-size lookups - the layer above this one's carrier detail.
• Head-to-head: SatBeams vs SatIndex Daily Transponder Scan Database - fleet context against per-PID scan depth, and why the join between them runs on orbital position strings.
• Breadth alternative: KingOfSat European Satellite Zapping Directory spans 25,839 channels across 162 countries where SatIndex runs deeper per transponder on fewer, hotter positions.
• Terminology: transponder scan - what a pass of this scanner actually does.