Help , with dish alignment

JAYEDIN

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I have been trying to set up my fixed dish for 'Hotbird 13 East' and the best signal strength I can get is 74%.

Although I can get some of the channels , How can I tweak the dish for a better signal?
i.e.
The pole is as vertical as I can get it on a harled wall.

My equipment:
1 meter dish mounted on a pole.
Manhatten plaza ST500
 

rolfw

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Have you skewed your LNB?, it needs to be twisted in the mount to match the satellite position. Go to www.smw.se and download the Swedish Microwave calculator, this will give you the Skew for your location.

Worth noting, the reading on the receiver is a rough guide only, which channels can you not receive?
 

bryanreid2005

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rolfw said:
Have you skewed your LNB?, it needs to be twisted in the mount to match the satellite position. Go to www.smw.se and download the Swedish Microwave calculator, this will give you the Skew for your location.

Worth noting, the reading on the receiver is a rough guide only, which channels can you not receive?

Hi there,

Just venturing out into setting up my own motorised system..and so far not having much luck...I've ensured the wall mount is as vertical as possible..and fitted my Jeager SMR 99 (H-h Motor) and 90cm Fortec Star Dish..Connected up the cables with a Sat Meter inbetween my LNB and Technomate 5500CIP receiver..

Moved dish and motor to face south, and peaked dish to get strong signal on meter..but when I plug it into my decoder it says no signal...what am I doing wrong..? Signal strength on receiver says ~81 with quality 10..?

Also when I move the motor from East to West..the LNB arm starts off at its lowest point when due South, then as I move either East or West the LNB are raises up (which seems to contradict the arc drawings in most diagrams I've seen)..Have I set the dish and motor up wrong..

Any help much appreciated.

Thanks
 

rolfw

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It is possible to mount the motor upside down, as a general rule of thumb, the connectors need to be at the bottom.
 

JAYEDIN

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rolfw said:
Have you skewed your LNB?, it needs to be twisted in the mount to match the satellite position. Go to www.smw.se and download the Swedish Microwave calculator, this will give you the Skew for your location.

Worth noting, the reading on the receiver is a rough guide only, which channels can you not receive?

I can get OTV Ok - I cannot get any of the other FTA ones at all.
I have skewed the LNB and tried several skews to get the optimum.

I am going to have another go with getting the pole exactly vertical with a borrowed post level.

Thanks
 

rolfw

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The plumbness of the mast is not quite so critical on a fixed dish. What frequency is OTV, is that the only channel you can get on the whole scan?
 

adamclark1234

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rolfw said:
The plumbness of the mast is not quite so critical on a fixed dish. What frequency is OTV, is that the only channel you can get on the whole scan?
Yeah true true, as i have found on a motorised system if the pole aint plumb you don't get 3/4 of the bloody satelites you want.
 

JAYEDIN

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rolfw said:
The plumbness of the mast is not quite so critical on a fixed dish. What frequency is OTV, is that the only channel you can get on the whole scan?
Rolf,
There were about 2 freeview ones that I saw as I clicked through the channels - all the others were scrambled. There were about approx 288 channels identified by the Auto All channel scan.
Most of the channels show a low signal strength on the screen ( 30-50)
which seems quite poor.

I read in Martin Pickering tutorial guides on Digital Sat - that wider dishes have a narrower focal angle - and this makes the dish alignment more critical. Mine is a 1 metre dish.
Intuitively it dosn't make sense as I always thought that the bigger dish would collect more signal and therefore be more tolerant of alignment accuracy!!.
Maybe I should get a smaller dish.
Anyway once the weather improves I'll use the Satellite meter to hopefully align the dish better.

Also I would have expected the Channel scan to have picked up i.e. Asianet which is a FTA but I did'nt see any signs of this channel - So question is do I need to manually add these channels/Transponder ??

Maybe the Manhatten channel search is not comprehensive.
 

rolfw

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You didn't answer my question about OTV, I don't know the channel, but I would bet good money that you are not looking at 13 East, on an all channel scan, you should get over 1000 channels.

I've just had a little look see and OTV is on Thor 1 West, try selecting that satellite and do a search.

PS. There is no advantage to getting a smaller dish, once you have set it up properly, you will appreciate the dish size.
 

JAYEDIN

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rolfw said:
You didn't answer my question about OTV, I don't know the channel, but I would bet good money that you are not looking at 13 East, on an all channel scan, you should get over 1000 channels.

I've just had a little look see and OTV is on Thor 1 West, try selecting that satellite and do a search.

PS. There is no advantage to getting a smaller dish, once you have set it up properly, you will appreciate the dish size.

Rolf,
You were right , OTV is a channel on 1 west.
At least now I know where the dish is pointing to.
The reason I believed I was pointing at 13 east is that in using the Manhatten plaza st500 - to align the dish using the following steps :-

1) In the channel scan I selected Hotbird 13 E satellite, tps1.
2) Then I set the channel scan on .
3) Outside I had set the dish elevation to 24 deg for Edinburgh.
4) Whilst the channel scan is ongoing I rotated the dish in azimuth until I got a 70% signal indication on the Receiver meter on the TV.

It seems that even although the Rx box has satellite names setup in it there is no means of associating that with the channels been searched - but it certainly is not very amenable to helping with dish alignment.

If only each defined Sat in the Receiver had a default FTA channel in channel number 1 then things would be so much easier to setup.

I'll let you know how I get on at the weekend.
 
J

Jeff_19341

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@ JAYEDIN

Regretfully your receiver has not got a mind of it's own so is not aware which satellite you are pointing your dish at. As you have found out different satellites, but usually not adjacent ones, use the same frequencies and symbol rates. You will have to do some of the work yourself in sorting out where south is from your location. A google search for one of the street map sites would help you quite a bit.
 
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