High-End Feed Hunting Setup Recommendations?

[Onesiphorus]

I was wondering if anyone had ideas on what a good setup for general feed hunting using a budget of around $US 5-10k? I've dabbled in lower-end feed hunting with a 30cm dish, Ku-band LNB, and basic TBS card (6903) but never had money like this to dump into it.

I managed to convince my university that a comparative survey of various signal properties (modulations schemes, standards, etc.) would be interesting for a research project and I now have a pretty good equipment budget to scoop up equipment. I have no idea where it's best spent and how to figure out compatibility for various components.

My general wishlist would be:

• Ability to add most of the Ka and C-bands to my existing Ku band setup, multiple dishes are fine but if there's a way to use a single dish that's better for roof real-estate. I'm a little confused about Ka-band LNBs and dishes and if they're meaningfully different from Ku/C in terms of setup requirements or if I can just slap a Ka band LNB on the same dish as a Ku-band one.
• As big a dish as I can buy without requiring construction crews / professional installation / structural assessments of the roof it's going on. Realistically, the upper limit for physical space on the roof probably maxes out at 2 meters.
• A Disqec compatible motor capable of moving that dish around. Even better if it has more degrees of motion than just along the horizon.
• A tuner card that can keep up with higher demodulations. Ideally it would let me record raw BBFrames or even IQ data off the drivers rather than processing it all the way up through the MPEG-TS stack.

Any product recommendations or advice people might be willing to give? The most confusing thing for me is figuring out which LNBs to get and how to be sure a motor is strong enough to move a large dish.

 

[moonbase]

For a 2.0m dish I would not use a diseqc motor. I think a polar mount or H-H mount or Az/El mount is needed for a 2.0m dish.
If you want to get C-Band feeds I think you need to go larger than 2.0m, a 3.0m dish would be better on USA satellites. You will also need some type of controller for the motorised mount.

Your TBS6903 card is decent spec, it is classed by TBS as a Pro grade card, personally I would stick with that for now and see how it copes with the new dish setups.

Some manufacturers produce a Ka-Band specific dish, supposedly manufactured to finer tolerances and sometimes increased parabolic reinforcement to maintain the profile. Personally, I have found that a standard dish does the job with a Ka-Band LNB. If you want to buy off the shelf Ka-Band LNB's have a look at the range sold by Norsat and XMW.

If you are prepared to buy new dish equipment you could contact DH Satellite, they are based in the USA and will have most things to meet your needs.