Huevos said:
Got to say I'm sceptical about all the negative reports from Barcelona and the Balearics. All the Barcelona dishes are in the 80cm/1m range, and a T90, which we don't even know what part of the arc it is centred on. And in Palma de Mallorca all the reports I've heard so far have been positive on a 1.3m dish. What we really need is a spectrum trace off one of those dishes so we can compare signal from 1N and 2F. The signal only needs to be a few tenths of a dB below the receive floor and any DVB receiver will display 0%.
From the signal reports we can definitely say there is a drop of in signal level on the Costa Brava and it increase back up as you go south towards the Costa Blanca before it drops off again on the Costa del Sol.
How bad the problem is, is really difficult to say, not just because these areas tend to have smaller dishes but even those with bigger dishes might not have them aligned correctly as it was never that critical.
What’s more LNB’s seem to go off with age. This is something people on the Costa Blanca discovered with Astra 2D and something people on the Costa Brava and Costa del Sol maybe about to discover. So the large dish signal reports maybe from poorly aligned dishes with knackered LNB’s.
We’re not going to get the full picture until BBC and ITV go off in the second half of next year. Then there will be a big incentive to find out what is needed in these area.
Terry
Update since I posted this I found the following
hxxp://tinyurl.com/bpso38x
which includes a report of a "Sky guy" trying a 3M dish in Malaga and finding it didn't work.
Assuming the "Sky guy" is a professional installer it doesn’t look good for the Costa del Sol. Could it be worse than the Canaries?