Solid Vs mesh

Robbiewright

Greetings from Cairo, After moving house a few times and moving my 3.1 meter mesh dish by camel, it is looking a bit floppy, even more then it did before. It will only stay together so long beeing held together with string and tape so its time to replace it, I am told by some people who are in the know,,,,maybe,, thet a solid dish will be better then a mesh one, others tell me there is no differance. What to do?? May be there is no point replacing it if it won't work when the new cards come out.

phil835

Generally speaking, solid dishes do tend to have a higher gain than their equivalent mesh counterparts. The overiding principle is quality though. It's a sweeping statement to say that all solid dishes are better than the same size mesh ones. But a high quality mesh dish built to exacting standards may well outperform a shoddily made solid dish of the same size !

You tend to get what you pay for in terms of quality.

To perform at it's optimum a dish must maintain the integrity of it's parabolic shape. So any warping or even dints will cause a loss in performance.
So be very carefull when transporting your prize assett. And if Camel is the only means available, it may already be too late :-(

rolfw

Hi Robbie,

Good to hear from you.

I go along whith Phil's comments.

I would add that in most cases, for Ku band reception, in my opinion, a well set up high quality solid will beat a similarly set up high quality mesh. The mesh does however have advantages in the weight department.

Once you get up to the three metre size range, the quality also becomes more important.

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Robbiewright

Thanks Phil and good to hear from you again too Ralf.

Being very careful is something we are not very good at here in Egypt and it has been moved and bashed around by countless so called satellite engineers who do more damage then good. Big dishes are hard to find and are quite expensive as there is a limit of 2.4 meters by law. (That isn’t enforced) I think I will give a solid 2.4 meter dish a go and see what happens before I start to try and find and pay for another mesh dish.

Thanks for your help,
Robbie

Old Satellite

A 2.4 solid replacement dish will most likely perform better than your old 3.0 mtr mesh.

Incedently the main differance is always in the kU band where the mesh versus solid is approx 0.8(mesh) to 1 solid) meaning that a dish of equal quality of mesh and solid construction, will result in a mesh dish perfoming approx 80 % of that of a Solid surface dish.

Generally in C band the differance is much less and can be considered as approx 0.95(95%)

You may be able to obtain very competitive prices from the Dubai,( there are lots of dealers) and shipping to Egypt is equally pretty good.

regards

Old Satellite