dish alignment, where have i gone wrong.

[chavo]

Hi all

Firstly my settings, i live at 53.4 north and 3 west. my motor elevation is 37, my dish inclination is 27 and a bit. i have a dark motor and a 95cm dish. LNb is set to 0 on skew.

When i set the dish at 28.2 east and get the alignment perfect then move it to 1w i get no signal, if i pull the lnb arm DOWN a touch then it locks, when i tighted up again and move back to 28.2 i need to move the dish UP again to get a lock.

is my elevation out or is my dish out? any help please as i am pulling my hair out and it is freezing!

Edit i would just add that at the moment i can get 7e,9e,10e,13,16, and 19.2 east all with a decent signal strength, 28.2 is weak at 72% and 1west is no signal.
I cab get some of the stronger signals on both 28 and 1west but the weaker ones i can not get on either, (military on 28 and TV2 on 1west no signal, BBc 1 on 28 and BBC world on 1west weak signal but picture.

 

[Robbo]

How did you set the motor elevation to 37, if I remember correctly the DarkMotors are marked LATITUDE on both sides, which needs to be set to your LATITUDE.

 

[chavo]

hi mate thanks for the reply, it has Latitude on one side and Elevation on the other, the side that has latitude on it is a little rusty so i used the manual for the motor elevation, it correspondes to 53-54 on the latitude but as it has almost rusted off completely i am using the elevation side.

 

[Robbo]

Ahh Ok, just checking.

First off, you need to set up on the centre of the arc, then check what its like at the ends, or see how far it gets. You need to see if your arc is symmetrical. If it is, then you can adjust the motor elevation a bit, re-adjust the dish elev, and see if its better at the arc ends. If not symmetrical, you need to sort that first.

 

[chavo]

Ok well i get everything from 0.8w to 28.2 east so then if i get a perfect alignment on 13east and take it from there, i think that would be a good start. thanks.

 

[Robbo]

If you don't have line of sight to west at all, then its a whole lot easier to fix, as you don't have to worry about the western side at all. You can just play with the motor elevation with the dish elevation adjusted to suit, until it all works. I would still keep going back to Thor as your reference though, as you do want to keep the bit from 1W to 13E working.


BTW , Tilting the dish down more and raising the motor up makes the arc drop more at the sides.

 

[chavo]

BTW , Tilting the dish down more and raising the motor up makes the arc drop more at the sides.

Thats the ticket. Thanks very much