Patent ID: 8204432

Claim:
A vehicle information system suitable for presenting direct broadcast satellite (DBS) television content provided via a selected satellite, comprising: a multi-regional antenna subsystem for receiving DBS television content from the selected satellite in response to antenna status and control data and having an antenna steering system for directing said multi-regional antenna subsystem toward the selected satellite in response to antenna positioning data; an antenna control subsystem for providing the antenna positioning data based upon a comparison of a position of the vehicle information system with a position of the selected satellite and including a predictive process for maintaining a pointing accuracy of said multi-regional antenna subsystem, said predictive process comprising a second-order predictive process for directing said multi-regional antenna subsystem toward the selected satellite based upon rate of position change data; a multi-regional receiver subsystem having at least one DBS receiver subsystem for receiving the DBS television content from said multi-regional antenna subsystem via an intermediate multiplexer and for providing a plurality of channels of the DBS television content and at least one encoder for encoding the channels of the DBS television content to provide a plurality of channels of encoded DBS television content for presentation in response to receiver status and control data; and an processor-based subsystem for providing the antenna status and control data and the receiver status and control data each being based upon a comparison of the position of the vehicle information system with contour boundary data for a coverage region of the selected satellite based upon a preselected signal strength.