Bigger Dish only small gains

Cliveastro

Having had very good weather I managed to replace my 70cm Uniden dish with a 85(90)cm Gibertini.
I notice that I do have gains in signal strength i.e. on Thor it went from 70% to 82% but these are not as much as I had hoped. Am I hoping for too much?
Also the bigger dish was a lot more twitchy to set up but this was expected.
The next option is maybe to change to a another LNB but I feel that the gains would be so small that I would be wasting my money. Options would be Sharp 0.3, MTI blue line or Smart Titanium.
Any suggestions.

Clive

Lancelot

12% signal strength is actually quite good. You may get another few points by putting up a fresh LNB and some good quality feeder for it.

How much were you expecting and have you tried the very weak satellites that you were unable to resolve previously ??



L.:

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Cliveastro

The answer to what I was expecting is, I dont know, and yes on Thor its actually 17% better. I should know better than to expect magic at my age.
When I can get at the telly I will let you know.
I did get a little silicone grease on the conductor, which I wiped off, but I know its a dificult to remove totally.
The feeder cable is good quality but possibly a bit old, but when I put a new F connector on it, the copper was bright and shiny.
The LNB is only 5 months old.
I did notice that my moteck motor was suffering with rust already (it got sprayed with zinc primer).

wod

excellent you could try a sharp or smart titanium lnb but they might make a difference or not

i didn't find it made a difference , but a larger dish is benifical, didn't you want to go for the gibertini 1metre ?

yes mine has start to rust already just the u bolts holding the bracket to the pole, the motor is cheap so could just buy another and use it as spares

Channel Hopper

The meter on the receivers on screen graphics is unlikely to be an accurate indication of the true improvement you have gained with the larger dish. Seeing such an increase is as much as you should venture unless you have an analyser with dB signal level.

It could be you might be able to squeeze a couple of extra mamsters from the system by tweaking the LNB in its housing, both rotational for best skew, and distance, for the best focal illumination.

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Cliveastro

I have tried tweaking the lnb in skew and position, it made no difference.
When I have a free evening I will compare the results I got with my old dish.
Living on the coast in the south I was probably spoilt in the first place.
I didnt go for a 1 metre as I didnt want to stress my motor too much.
The Gibertini is light tho.

motorman72

Hi all,

I learned that going for Signal QUALITY is the best way for a better reception despite signal STENGTH may get a little bit weaker. Just give it a try

Best wishes
Andreas

digdog

Signal improvements in Sats that came in good before are not real improvements as such - you still get the same channels.

Where you will gain is on weaker transponders and Sats - stuff that was marginal before will probably be solid now...and for me that is worth having.

With a digital signal there is a threshold where you either get the signal or you dont - this is sometimes called the digital cliff. Once you have got over this and got the channel solid, for practical purposes no further signal strength improvement will improve your picture.

And as a general rule you wont need much skew as the motor/dish movement pretty well sorts this automatically. Best compromise for me was to set lnb dead vertical on Thor - and then move lnb in/out a little from dish just to get that last little bit more signal.

And as others have said always go for best quality.

Hope this helps a little..

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Cliveastro

I have had a bit of a play now and I find I can get Nilesat on 7west.
So I do have an improvement, I dont feel so bad now.