Behind The Scenes

Time to do the ‘dishes’: What it’s like to clean ESPN’s satellite antennas?

If there’s one universal chore that we all dreaded as kids — and some of us still hide from as a adults — it’s probably doing the dishes.

On ESPN’s Bristol Campus, we’ve got dishes of a different sort that need to be cleaned once in awhile. But these aren’t the kind you can just put in the dishwasher and walk away. Ours are satellite antennas — giant satellite antennas that can withstand winds up to 125 mph under certain circumstances — that ESPN uses to distribute content to 256 million households and 190 countries and territories.

So what does it take to clean these 23 dishes and how do we make sure these’s no signal loss to our fans while we do it? Front Row found out. And it wasn’t a chore, it was actually pretty fun, though somehow our reporter ended up in a bird bath along the way.

Video produced by Tonya Malinowski.

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