Advise before buying/installing new system (Wavefrontier T90)

[Descore]

Hi,

I want to set up a multi-sat system with 4 LNB's. It's going to connect to my MythTV backend and integrate with my DVB-T system already in place.

I've never done this before although I've done as much research online as I could (and I do have experience with fitting standard terrestrial aerial systems). So what I'm hoping for is for you veterans out there, to go through my setup and point out what might be wrong, before I fork out 100's of pounds on useless equipment

The sats I want to receive are:

• Thor 5 at 0.8° W
• Sirius 4 at 4.8°E
• Hot Bird 6/8/9 at 13.0°E
• Eurobird 1 & Astra 2A/2B/2D at 28.2°E

I have purchased 2 TechnoTrend Budget S2-1600 tuner cards for my backend already. The idea is to have 4 dual-LNB's, connected 4 and 4 to DiSEqC switches, that way I should be able to watch + record anything at the same time on any of the sats.

What I've put in my shopping cart, so far, for the system (all from falconsat.co.uk):

• 1 * FORCE Frontier 90cm MULTI SATELLITE
• 1 * 36" x 2" Wall/Floor COMBI Mount (for mounting the dish on the flat part of my roof)
• 4 * 75 Ohm Terminator 'F' Type (for terminating the extra outputs on each LNB until I fix the 2nd switch)
• 100pcs F Connectors / F Plugs
• 100m WEBRO 'FOAM' WF100 Black PVC cable
• Satellite Finder (the cheapo one for £7.50) - is this good enough?
• 4 * MTI TWIN LNB H/V-H/V 0.3dB (BLUELINE)

Does this all look reasonable and have I missed anything obvious?

The dish looks good for this purpose since there's an almost 30 degree span on the sats I want to receive and comes with 5 LNB holders and has comparable gain to a single-point 90cm dish. Does anyone have experience with this dish or something similar?

Also I would like to know, about how hard it is to align the LNB's. I was planning on using the "dishpointer" Google Maps tool since it comes up with very clear landmarks for my house for how to point the sats (there are lots of trees, light poles etc. to align by) so I was hoping I wouldn't need a compass and could align it manually, using the meter. I guess aligning a single LNB-dish would be simple it's just a matter of turning the dish to point to the direction of the sat, but what about multi LNB, is there any tutorial on how to align these and any good advise you can give? I guess I'd point the dish towards the weakest sat (Thor 5's T1 beam), and center that LNB but how do I get the distance right for the other LNB's, are there any tools I can use or should get?

In any case I'd really appreciate any feedback on this setup before I go and click the "Buy" button

Cheers
Descore

 

[Robbo]

Not done one personally but there is a calculator to give you the LNB positions:-

_http://www.satlex.de/en/wavefrontier_calc.html

Also for ease of setup, you will want to get the pole perfectly vertical, you may struggle with the wall bracket you are proposing. Much easier with T&Ks and a pole.

There's a member on here who has very recently set one of these up, hopefully he will be able to advise further. I have changed the title of your thread.

 

[Descore]

Thanks! That calculator tool is definitely useful - it will make it _much_ easier to set up. Regarding the pole, in fact it's going to be mounted on a flat roof not a wall, but this was the only 2" one I could find at that site. Do you know any better solution for putting it up on a flat roof?

Cheers
Descore

 

[Bruce1Gunn]

Hi Descore

I have just completed my first sat installation and have a couple of pointers that might help

I was given a standard sky minidish,
bought a quad lnb from ebay for around £8,
then I put 2 s350 sat tuners cards in my pc and -
picked up 8x F connectors and 100m foam filled cable from Screw Fix for about £32.
So off I go, ladder in hand !

I used the Google pointer tool for a rough aim, but evelation was more difficult as an offset lnb makes it tricky to measure the angle.
After the first try, I scanned and got NOOTHINGG.
So I went and looked at a neighbours dish for a better stab at the elevation. Scanned again and got loads of channels ! but some either wouldn't work or were very poor quality.

Then I bought a cheap Konig sat finder from ebay <£10 (no patch lead with mine, had to make one).
AND TODAY - I went out there and set the dish up again, it's so easy to use (forget the german instructions), you just connect it to the reciever and the lnb (switch everything off first). Then power up, the backlight will come on to signify that power is getting up there.

In my case I already had some working channels, so I was surprised to find no signal recorded on the sat finder. This was because i had it turned right down to -6. So I turned it upto about +4 and got a good bleeping and needle response (shiver!).

So I started fiddling with the dish, needle goes off the top, turn it down a bit, then try again. After 10 mins I had the horizontal and vertical aim all sorted and I tightend everthing up.
Leaving the satfinder still connected allowed me to then gently push the dish around even with all the bolts firmly done up. The slightest movement away from it's current aim (up/down or L/R) reduces the signal. So I'm happy.

And on the TV, all the channels I care about work and picture quality is better than it was. (Personally I think std def sucks, can't they all be HD ?)


So in brief, the little cheap satfinder is great, I have a used one that I probably won't need again. BUT I'm gonna keep it. If you live close you could borrow it and/or I could give you a hand.

So to sum up -
I haven't a clue about your somewhat techy set up except -
The Google tool is useful, but you have to get a bit luck to recieve any channels.
The Konig satfinder is worth it's cost several times over (and no I don't sell them). The only thing it doesn't help with is skew, so my question is
"How do I set up my skew for no monies, without a Sky box ?)

All the best, good luck,
B

 

[pez909]

These frontier dishes are not 90cm. I forget the exact size but it was around 108 x 116cm and quite a beast along with the front section. I believe the "90" designation means it supposedly gives the equivalent of 90cm dishes.

I bought one and it was not really suitable for wall mount. The ground bracket doubled up as a wall mount. The arms were too splayed. If you are having it on the ground then you will be fine.

I ended up with a Triax dish and multi-bracket. Much tidier and lighter. I just cannot get as wide a range but no major deal TBH. And I kept my Sky mini dish* but fed it through the 8-way diseqc to pick up the FTA HD.

Currently receiving 1W, 4/5E, 9/10E, 13E, 16E, 19E and 28E*.

 

[Huevos]

solution for putting it up on a flat roof?

You could use a ground stand. Have a look at my pictures here.

 

[Descore]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the advise. Bruce1Gunn, is the meter you are talking about similar to the one I'd put on my list, this one: _http://falconsat.co.uk/products/Satellite-Finder.html ?

Pez909, I think I really need either the Wavefront or multiple dishes, unfortunately due to WAF the latter is out of the question so I'm going to have to go with that one. The ground stand should fit on my flat roof but I still need to survey it first, which is a problem right now due to a combination of my ladder not being quite long enough + .. well.. TBH I'm a bit scared of climbing up there, but I'll get over it.

I'll keep you posted on how I get on, I plan to buy the stuff next week and install it next weekend, weather permitting.

 

[Bruce1Gunn]

The one I bought looks very similar.
Here's a link to it, this one comes with a patch cable for the same price I paid for it without one.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Konig-Satelli...0|66:2|65:12|39:1|240:1318|301:1|293:1|294:50

 

[Robbo]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the advise. Bruce1Gunn, is the meter you are talking about similar to the one I'd put on my list, this one: _http://falconsat.co.uk/products/Satellite-Finder.html ?

Pez909, I think I really need either the Wavefront or multiple dishes, unfortunately due to WAF the latter is out of the question so I'm going to have to go with that one. The ground stand should fit on my flat roof but I still need to survey it first, which is a problem right now due to a combination of my ladder not being quite long enough + .. well.. TBH I'm a bit scared of climbing up there, but I'll get over it.

I'll keep you posted on how I get on, I plan to buy the stuff next week and install it next weekend, weather permitting.

A non-penetrating roof mount is what you need. It is held down by sticking paving slabs on the base.

 

[Descore]

Time for an update!

First a big thank you to everyone who posted excellent advise. Especially the Satellite Calculator and the hint about Non-Penetrating Roof Mount helped a lot.

I got all the kit and installed it Saturday/Sunday. First a word of warning: The FalconSat webshop is rubbish - they didn't ship my order and didn't reply to my emails for 2 weeks. At the end I got fed up and ordered the kit from elsewhere and had it the next day!

Assembling the dish took a couple of hours with my limited experience. The instructions were photocopied and some of the details were impossible to make out on the photos so a bit of guesswork was needed, but I got there in the end.

I asked in an email to one of the webshops what size pole was needed to mount the dish on. They said 2". So I happily bought the Non Penetrating Roof Mount, which is 2", but unfortunately the dish needs a 60mm pole (about 2.3 inches) - when will we ever get rid of metric/imperial confusion!?

I fixed this by cutting off a bit of the pole from the patio stand supplied with the dish using an angle grinder and mounting that over the top of the pole on the NPRM using rubber tape to stabilize it and silicon to seal it in place. This caused the angle to be off from vertical by a small amount (I guess about 1 degree) but this proved not to be a problem.

Before I mounted the dish I set the skew angle and mounted the LNB's according to the Toroidal Calculator output. Then I put it up on the mount and angled it to the central satellite 13E based on my dishpointer.com printout. It was very easy since there was some clear landmarks to aim it for.

Then I connected the SatFinder to the center LNB and my tuner card in the other end. After moving the elevation up and down a bit I got got a 10 signal!

Then I tightened the elevation nuts at what gave the highest signal (after turning the sensitivity down). I then fine tuned the azimuth but it was almost spot on from the outset.

After that, I connected the satfinder to the other LNB's. Amazingly they all came up with a high signal straigth away, except for one (the 0.8W satellite)! I moved the 0.8W LNB slightly on the bar and then it too came up with a maxed out signal.

The whole process of aligning the dish, took about 5 minutes! And this is the first time I have ever done this. Without the Toroidal calculator and the Dishpointer website this would have taken much, much longer.

After tightening up everything I then connected 1 output from each LNB to each of the switches. Then it was MythTV time!

Setting up the switches and LNB's in mythtv-setup was intuitive and easy. Unfortunately nothing worked (scanning/tuning) after that even with dvbscan I got nothing.

This was with the latest Linux kernel's stock v4l-dvb drivers (2.6.29.4). I found out after some Googling that the Linux drivers for the TechnoTrend Budget 1600 card were quite new and didn't work very well, especially when LNB switches were involved. So I tried with the linuxtv.org Mercurial repository v4l-dvb drivers. No luck.

I googled some more and then found a German guy who had his own v4l-dvb repository _http_://www.jusst.de/hg/v4l-dvb/

THIS worked! (make && make install && make load and the drivers were installed).

MythTV now scanned all the satellites without issue and I found more than 900 unencrypted channels in total (including BBC HD and the foreign channels I was looking for). Comparing to Lyngsat I think I have all of them. On my Frontend I tried watching some of the channels and every single one worked without glitches. The only thing is that the Signal Strength always shows at 99% but I think this is a driver issue with the TT card (and will probably be resolved at some point, the drivers are only a month old!)

So all in all I am extremely happy with my new system and everything worked out. Again thanks for the help to all of you guys! If anyone is thinking of installing a similar system I'll be happy to help with my experiences.

Cheers
Descore

 

[Topper]

So all in all I am extremely happy with my new system and everything worked out. Again thanks for the help to all of you guys! If anyone is thinking of installing a similar system I'll be happy to help with my experiences.

Cheers
Descore

Glad you got the desired results well done

 

[satelliteman]

Nice result :-righton

 

[Descore]

Here are some pictures of the completed setup. Notice the great British weather for once ;)

 

[Robbo]

Very pleased it went well, and very well done!


I am suprised how far down the dish points, it must have a larger than normal offset angle.

 

[B16MCC]

I do like the look of these dishes but I'm not sure I would replace my motor with it. It would site nicely on my garage roof though, although I'd mount it a lot lower down the pole. Thanks for the pics.

 

[arbra]

Hi,

I'm re-installing my T90 on the ground because my neighbour didn't like the dish too much and i wondered if it was OK to place the disecq switch outside like shown on the pictures. This will avoid me a lot of cabling work (+/- 30 m between the dish and the receiver x 4 lnb's) but the only switches i can find here in Brussels are all for inside installation What kind of model(s) are suitable for outside use ?

 

[Lazarus]

Odd. Most DiSEqC switches come with rainproof covers these days!