Advice on where and how to site 90cm dish

Mercedes

I need some advice on where and how to mount a 90cm dish.

Apologies for the length of the post, but I want to provide as much detail as possible.

We have spoken to our local installer but we have rather taken 'agin' him, as our guts tell us he's a ripoff merchant. (Not to put too fine a point on it.) He will want at least 400 euros, and probably more, to sort this out for us. I don't know if this is reasonable or not, but it sounds a lot, and is by no means a fixed quote. He prefers to do the work first then think of a number after.

We are in a rented fairly new house in a wide valley in central eastern France. The village is quiet and I think the risk of having the dish stolen is slight. One of our neighbours has a large dish mounted on a low wall, so this obviously doesn't bother them.

Climate-wise, the winters are cold and we get snow, but I don't believe we are especially susceptible to high winds.

The house already has a 60cm dish on a pole on the roof which has been tuned to Astra 1 (by our friend the dish fitter). We have an Orange TV subscription which gets us the main French TV channels plus a lot of other stuff we never watch.

We also want to be able to watch the mainstream UK BBC and ITV channels, and from what I can gather we would be advised to get a 90cm Triax dish with a twin or quad output LNB.

We could mount it on the roof with the other one, but as this is a rental and we want to take it with us when we leave we are looking at other alternatives. We also want to avoid drilling any holes etc. which would be hard to make good if we took stuff down.

The rear of the house faces approximately south, and is covered in pristine decorative white render, but it has a wooden shed/wood store on one end. This is the "wrong" end of the house from the room in which the TV lives, but would be easier to make good if we had to take anything down. The patio area at the back and the footings of the house are laid to gravel (fairly large chunks of limestone chippings). The rest of the garden is grassed over, with a cow field to the rear, and with no large shrubs or trees for several hundred metres.

I don't think there are any issues with annoying the neighbours, as the people at the front would not see it, and the houses at the side are too far away, and the back is cows and buzzards.

To avoid drilling the wall we are intending to pass the cable through a window opening, and we know that you can get special sections of low profile cable to do this. We would need 2 runs of cable from the dish's LNB to the house because of the Humax's recorder.

Assuming for a moment that we could find the satellite just as easily either way, from a technical and reception viewpoint, would we be better off mounting the dish on the back of the wooden shed using T & K brackets and running a length of cable along the back of the house, or concreting in a metal pole or wooden post in the garden nearer the window, thus with a shorter run of cable? Or is there another alternative we haven't considered?

Thanks for your patience. All help gratefully received.

Robbo

Hi,

You simply need to put the dish somewhere that it has line of sight to the satellite. Go to dishpointer.com , find your location, select 28E and you can check which way it points.

You can mount the dish to whatever you want, as long as you end up with a dish that is mounted firmly. Pole concreted into the ground works well, but requires digging effort. A pole fixed to a firm shed, but resting on a paving slab on the ground works well too. As long as good cable is used, cable runs of up to 40m are not a problem at all with standard 100 cable. Even 60m seems to work OK too (not tried any longer than that)

For 100's of metres a fibre optic LNB can be used.