Experiences with Europe (Germany) beam of Astra 3

NickPGSmith

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I have an 80cm Triax dish focused on 19.2E with Inverto Green, and another Green offset (touching) for 23.5E/Astra3 / Sony TV.

I can get good signals on the Europe Wide beam (eg REBEL, 12012 MHz) but am struggling with the Europe/Germany beam, eg radio stations at 11681 MHz. I know it's going to borderline here in SE London, but the odd thing is the type of problem: not just a weak signal, but how changeable it is. It can peak at 50% "signal quality", usually 20-40%, but varies every few seconds, with periodic dropouts to 0% which make it unusable. I would expect some variations in bad weather, wind or bursts of interference, but this happens reasonably regularly every few seconds on a fine, still day.

Of course I have tried to tweak the skew, LNB position but have not yet found anything to stop this changeability. Does anyone else see this effect, or could postulate a cause?
 

ozumo

te wo tsuite
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Have you tried a different LNB? Try putting 23.5°E as the main focus and offsetting 19.2°E.
 

NickPGSmith

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Have you tried a different LNB? Try putting 23.5°E as the main focus and offsetting 19.2°E.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Do you mean a different Green LNB? I think I have a spare somewhere and could try fairly easily. Do you think it could be stable and some frequencies but not at others?

I also have 2 other LNBs hanging off for Astra 2 and Hotbird 13, and when I first put up the dish I *did* have Astra 3 as prime focus, but found Astra 1 as primary gave a better compromise between the 2 extreme positions. Unfortunately when I was pointing at Astra 3 I didn't look at all the channels closely so didn't notice/investigate the anomaly.

Since repointing the dish would consume a lot of time to realign everything it will have to wait until my wife is out for a few hours ;-)
 

ozumo

te wo tsuite
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Yes any other LNB. I have an old Inverto Black Ultra Twin on my main dish, on weaker narrow bandwidth transponders (from cold, LNB unpowered for a while) I get stable signal for a few minutes and then it starts to become unstable with signal coming in and out of lock. The last transponder I noted this on was the I'm a Celebrity feed which had a 10000 symbol rate.
 

a33

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and another Green offset (touching)

As you write they are touching, did you leave the 19E LNB at the maximum quality position, or did you find the 'best compromise' position for both 19E and 23E?
I would certainly go for the latter..

When the compromise position is not so good, consider to use a smaller diameter LNB for 19E (if the LNB-holders allow that), or consider to use a monoblock LNB there, with the proper distance between feedhorns. (In the latter case, you'd have to add things to your 4/1 diseqc switch, if you use just diseqc level x.0.)

Greetz,
A33
 
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