Fibo 90 up!

[Captain Jack]

I had this lying for a while (it's @scopus's from around 10 years ago!) and with the eastern front being obscured by the neighbour's tree for my 1.8m CM, I needed a different location for another dish.

I had several lying around but opted to go for the Fibo 90 to go next to Fibo 55 on the wall. The range there is between 30W to 68.5E-ish, though the area between 55E and 66E is partially obscured by yet another tree in the distance.

I started off with a rath manky dish - so I cleaned it up, gave it a rough spray paint job and stuck a "Philips" logo on it as that's what it was branded as.



Then came the motor set up (kindly donated by @Channel Hopper). One lovely thing about the dish is that you can almost do the motor and bracket stuff on the ground and then simply literally hang the dish on its bolts. Triax could learn a thing or two from this...



Then came the cabling which runs for 30m from one side of the house, up the wall to the loft and out the other side. Besides navigating the dump site that is the loft, it's a tedious job that took half a day... It's a twin cable, so I can connect it up to two receivers (with one in control obvs).



And yes, the "K" always goes at the top with my installs....

 

[Captain Jack]

With the mounting up and cable ran, it was a matter of hanging the dish and doing the alignment.

I must say that the el-cheapo GTMedia V8 satellite meter has been pretty helpful. It has a good battery, supports USALS and I can scan the channels to see what satellite I am on. The alignment isn't perfect, maybe have a degree out, but it'll do for now. It was getting cold and windy towards the evening.

The dish is pointing towards 30W there. The 28.2E dish has also benefited from a new Philips sticker!

 

[Captain Jack]

Recently I noticed that the Sky box kept losing signal in rainy weather from the smaller Fibo. This was because the Inverto twin C120 LNB has a long body and is fouling the boom arm, so I cannot rotate the LNB enough to get the skew right for 28.2e.

A few options I had were to fit an Invacom C120 LNB but I only have one and it's on the Fibo 90. New ones cost £pfft money and they are rare to find second hand.

I could have also rotated the whole dish to compensate for the skew but there's no easy way to do that without hacking up the metalwork. Rotating the LNB 180 degrees was an option and gave me much stronger signal but it looked ugly with the cables pointing upwards. Not great for water ingress.

Lastly I could have somehow adapted a normal LNB to attach to the Fibo feed horn but I don't have a lathe to do this...

I went for neither of these options and the only twin LNB I had that cleared the arm was from @rayo77 - a standard 40mm one. I had a few brackets from the LNB changer that I could use to attach the thing to the Fibo... A few minutes of alignment yielded pretty decent results, so hopefully Made in Chelsea will continue uninterrupted in the rains.

 

[a33]

Rotating the LNB 180 degrees was an option and gave me much stronger signal but it looked ugly with the cables pointing upwards.

Rotating the LNB 90 degrees is something you didn't want also?
It would just swap the polarities in your transponder list.

Greetz,
A33

 

[Captain Jack]

Rotating the LNB 90 degrees is something you didn't want also?
It would just swap the polarities in your transponder list.

Greetz,
A33

Not something I can easily do on the Sky box

 

[a33]

Not something I can easily do on the Sky box

Ah, a Sky box, OK.
That's a pity...