Professional earth stations need full redundancy in every aspect of their transmit and receive chain. On the receive side it is normal to use an LNA plate. This device consists of two or more LNA's connected to a redundancy controller. Each LNA operates via a baseball switch, and depending on the switch's position, either LNA A, or LNA B, is actively connected to the down converter.
The controller can be set to automatic mode, or it can be set to manual mode, where the earth station engineer can force the change from one LNA to the other.