It's vanishingly rare for radio-based networks to actually rely on high level IP behavior for redelivery, as it's much faster to fix these issues on the single radio link than to wait for things to go round trip. The data link protocol typically has its own reliable delivery implementation that will result in multiple retries. This results in increased latency in poor network conditions. 802.11 behaves similarly.

They may be using link-layer ARQ which resends corrupted packets instead of dropping them.

Maybe the dish is connecting to farther away satellites closer to the horizon due to packet losses on the first satellite?