Manual Dish Setup - sound stuttering.

A

andy.tuck

Member
My Satellite Setup
low tech freesat newbie
My Location
southend on sea, essex
Ok, don't shoot me down, a couple of straightforward questions relating to freesat.

Iv'e tried trawling through the forums to look for the procedure to set up a dish manually, but really without any equipment !

Here's my life history - then the question...

Iv'e been running fine for more than a year on an old (approx 2008) sky oval mesh dish with a labgear HD receiver.
Just recently the sound started stuttering so badly the sync was lost and it became un-watchable.
I checked the coax end to end, changed the F type at the dish for good measure, visually the single LNB (ZKF-BJ21) looks undamaged.
Tried deleting all the channels and re-scanning, very poor results, sometimes hangs mid scan.
Originally when I put the box in the scan was very good with no freezing.
There were never any problems with the video - although on some rare occasions the HD channels had artefacts.

For info the box is set up to look at 4 satellites, and has the signal strength / quality as below.

Astra2 Eurobird 1 E28.2 (85/75)
Hotbird (42/5)
Astra E 19.2 (85/72)
Eurobird 1 (85/56)


Then out of desperation I decided to try moving the dish... using the sig strength and quality indicators, and my wife on the phone.

Didn't see any change adjusting it vertically, (other than total loss) so put it back to where I marked it.
Tweaked up Eurobird 1 by moving it horizontally to get (85/75)
Still getting (85/75) on Astra 2 Eurobird 1 after tweaking.

Tried the adjuster on the LNB that rotates it, end to end, no noticable improvement, left it so the coax outlet was about 7pm (found somewhere on this forum).

Still got the stuttering, Astra2 Eurobird 1 is worse, HD is worse, I junked all the channels on Astra 2 Eurobird and did a single satellite search on Eurobird 1, which scans OK and completes - but the stuttering is still intermittent.
​

So the questions...

Is the alignment more critical for the sound than the picture - I have a faultless picture, even on HD.
Is it viable to align a dish manually without equipment and remain marred ?
Is this likely to still just be an alignment issue or has something changed out there in the bitstream ?
Is a cheap meter going to be any better for alignment than my signal quality indicator in the box or am I wasting my money ?
Could it be a simple as the tree across the road has got bigger - sound stupid I know.

Thanks in advance,

Andy
 
If possible check your receiver on another dish set up, anyone with Sky will do. I suspect the problem is with your receiver although your set up is unusual.
How are you getting 4 satellites?
Are you using a Diseqc switch?
try connecting just one cable, to your receiver, and see if you still experience sound problems.
Can you please explain more regarding your set up, are you using multiple dishes or 1 dish with multiple LNB'S?
If possible upload some pictures.
 
Sorry, I gave a misleading view of my setup.

There is only 1 dish,1 LNB, 1 downlead, direct from the LNB to the freesat box. (I think it was a standard SKY install from a previous resident)
The box itself has a built in menu where by default it shows these 4 satellites and you can tick/untick the ones you want to use.
So when you go to scan for channels it just works its way through all the satelites you have ticked on the menu.

It's that simple - thanks for the interest (good idea about trying on a friends setup in the area too) - seems obvious, I didn't think of it !
 
All that scanning those satellites does is re-scan Astra 28.2 and clog up the database, you can only see one satellite with a single LNB on a static dish.
 
If you want more satellites think about a multi lnb or a motorised system. One of our installers could install something suitable if you arent confident of doing it yourself.

If you think you might be interested in this solution put an advert in the Installer Wanted section :)
 
Try a sky box in place of the box you have now and as mentioned above, take your box to another house and try it there

Also, did you try a factory reset to wipe the box all together and then a rescan?

Is the box covered or in a place where it is going to get hot? If it is, move it somewhere it`s not going to get as hot and leave it cool down then try again
 
I would say get an installer as already adviced, unless you want the satisfaction of doing it yourself, in which case invest in a reasonable meter. Preferably one that will identify the Satellites and channels for you. It´s fun and not difficult.
 
Thanks all - I have managed to borrow a signal strength meter - I have to admit there will be some satisfaction in doing this myself, something to do with being a nerdy Engineer I fear..

I also found what looks like a brilliant app for my smart phone. It uses the GPS and Compass to get your location. You enter the details of the satellite you want to locate and then use the on screen display with some moving balls to set the inclination and azimuth. As I say it looks great, very sensitive and even has an option to tick to detect magnetic disturbance in case you are being pulled off target by nearby metal items. I should be able to spend hours tinkering now and not half to get the wife on the phone to watch the TV while I tune.

Just one more question for Rolfw if he happens to pick this up again - on the topic of the selectable satellites menu in the freesat box.
I guess I am trying to relate how this tuning / scanning works from my distant past in radio.

If I physically pointed the dish at Astra2 Eurobird 1 E28.2
and ticked the box in the decoder for both Astra2 Eurobird 1 E28.2 and Eurobird 1 E28.5
when it scans "both" satellites, are you saying it will do the first pass and populate a database against the Astra2 Eurobird 1 "label".
then do the next pass, scan the same physical frequencies and populate the same received set against the Eurobird 1 "label".
This I can understand as a pointless excercise.

It also makes sense if the received beams of the two satellites don't overlap at my dish - this is the physics of satellites I don't understand.

What puzzles me is why the two scans seem to pick up some additional different (all English watchable) channels.
 
Well here's what I did and maybe some useful info for another newbie.

The smart phone satellite finder works well to get you pointed in the right direction.
A word of caution, the compass in the smart phone is constantly subjected to all sorts of unpleasant distractions as it travels around with you in your car / pocket / etc.. So if you want to use the phone to find a satellite calibrate the phone compass with a real one first in a clear space.
Once calibrated I could use it to find the satellite with good accuracy.
But all of that said, it just gets you started.

You do need a meter from here, I borrowed a LED / squeaking one.
I'd go as far as to say for a beginner you are wasting your time trying to do find and line up without one unless you have a very good signal meter on your box that you can see as you make changes - trying to get someone to talk it back to you over the phone will result in divorce.
With this kind of cheap meter you can align vertical, horizontal but not really skew - not sensitive enough and too much disturbance from "you" near the dish.
I would also recommend getting one with an analogue physical meter not digital LEDs.

One other thing - that I didn't see mentioned on the beginner forums, if your LNB can be slid towards and away from the dish you can optimise this position too (I guess focus).

From there you have to resort to watching the "signal quality" on the box.

Another useful point, on my cheap free to air box you can pick an individual (program?) TP from the setup to tune with.
So I picked ITV1 HD as this was the channel that was most susceptible to noise and break up in the past.

You can also then flip between the next nearest frequency/TP with "the other" polarisation.
I think this allows you to check the skew better, you can flip between H and V channels that are nearly on the same frequency.

I suspect when you use the signal quality meter at the top level from the whole satellite menu it is averaging the quality from the two polarisations - which isn't much help if you have a flickery digital scale to try and tune to.
By chosing one polarisation I could actually turn the skew of the LNB (and the dish if necessary) to get a peak.

Flush with my success I decided to fit a 60cm dish to the other side of the house away from all the trees etc..

The 60cm dish is nearly round (it came in the free to air kit I just hadn't used it - up till now I had just used the tiny approx 45cm high oval sky dish already on the house when I moved in).

From my experience the 60cm dish was much much easier to physically move, less critical and easier to find the individual satellites in the first place. If you are starting off as a newbie trying to tune a small sky dish it's not easy. The brackets twist when you move them. The LNB plastic fittings are sloppy and poor tolerance, as you move things they don't come back to the same place when you make adjustments. When you tighten the sky dish up everything twists - you will really struggle to get a decent result without a meter.
As for the skew on a sky dish it relies on a plastic bump to hold it in place. I had better results running the skew hard up against the end and then skewing the dish on it's brackets - maybe that's going to be a problem to do with orbits and arcs... I'll let you know.

The result was a slightly better signal from the 60cm dish about 5 to 10% taking me to 90% at best.
Signal quality from the 60cm dish was about 5% better - It's just started raining so I will see if there's any stuttering.

Now iv'e got two dishes, two down leads and a bit of a bug - So I pointed one at Hotbird just for the sake of it. Suddenly I need to know all about Diseqc switches and decoding - I think I could waste hours like this.. Good fun though.
 
Great stuff!

I like your report as it is encompasses many of the issues faced (and overcome!) by relative beginners.

The encouraging thing is you've found how very much easier it becomes ............ so much so that you might feel the meter is just a prop now, to be cast aside to relax forever in the bottom of the spares bin:

You can probably now probably bung up a dish and get it aligned by instinct, using the Receiver only, within minutes.

Very well done.
 
Well done. :)

The smaller the dish the easier it is normally to align, the larger the dish, the narrower the acceptance angle, probably not really noticeable until you pass the 80cm mark though, once you get up to 1.2m dishes, the smallest movement will lose signal altogether. The newer Sky minidishes are much easier to align accurately and the fittings are better and lots of our members here have aligned using only the signal meter on their digibox with great results. Skew is also easy to set using that scale, as you simply move it one click at a time and check the quality readings after each click, skewing by rotating the dish on the bracket will move the dish across the arc and lose signal if you're not careful, requiring realignment.

DiseqC switches are a doddle and inexpensive, definitely worth having a play.:)
 
Lots of interesting stuff there to me as another newby. I wouldn´t dream of pointing a dish without my meters and I have two. One identifies the satelite and the other actually lets me play the channels. I am still considering buying another, the FS1. I don´t know if it identifies the channels. Also I would have thought that where I am the bigger the dish the easier it would be to tune in. Actually that is my experience. All great fun, so thank you.
 
Bigger dishes have narrower beamwidth, which means it is more difficult to attain and retain correct alignment.
 
I didn´t know that but the further away I am from the center of the footprint the bigger the dish needed. Is that right?"
 
Yes, but the diminishing EIRP contours are not necessarily concentric, which can lead to apparently anomalous reception possibilities (good) or, conversely, can mean that punters living only a few km apart can often get wildly differing results (bad).
 
I think I understood that. Actually I am none the wiser. Sorry
 
Thanks to mods and others. I will probably be back in about six months when I have googled some of the terminology and technology!
 
Do what I do. Hang around and keep reading. I am learning slowly and enjoying it. I have even contributed in my own small way. Nobody knows everything.
 
Back
Top