Missing channels on Hotbird 13.0E

[svedish]

Hello guys,

a complete newbie here, so please forgive any stupid questions.
I am having a weird (at least for me) problem. I've installed a fixed sat dish to point at Hotbird (I bought a £59.99 Fortec Star kit from Maplins) to watch Italian television.

Before fine tuning I managed to scan for 40 channels. After fine tuning I got roughly 200 (with many with big pixel blocks). At that point I checked the signal and the strenght was 90%, while the quality was very low (between 10 and 35, often going up and down). I had a read around and I understood that the 'skew' was important. In fact I got the quality at 75-78%. Could't do better.

A new scan gave me at this point 450 channels and all the pixels were gone. The quality is really fine, at least for the channels I manage to see...

In fact, the problem is that some channels are just missing. Some big ones (like the Mediaset package - I.E. Italia 1, Canale 5, Rete 4 - or Euronews, or BBC World as well if I remember well).

I don't understand why to be honest. That's why I posted here.

Got a pretty vertical bracked, 90% strenght and 75% quality. Shouldn't this be enough to avoid missing whole packages of channels? I can understand some pixelation, but whole transponders not being loaded...2

Please help and, if any of you does this job in the London area, I'm happy to offer you some work to fine tune this thing.

Big thanks.
Best

 

[Mickha]

You shouldn't have any problems getting those channels as Hotbird is a very powerful satellite.
Are you scanning in the correct frequencies?
11919 V 27500
12597 V 27500
Try scanning them in again but alter the frequency slightly, e.g. 11921 V 27500 or 11917 V 27500.
Do you have a cordless phone? As these have been known to affect a particular frequency, I can't currently remember which frequency, if so try unplugging the base unit.

 

[Robbo]

Frequencies affected by DECT phones are:-

12480 MHz to 12500 MHz and 11630 MHz to 11650 MHz

 

[rolfw]

Fortecstar kit may be the keywords here, as if it has the FCKUVN LNB, the skew will be well out, see this thread

 

[svedish]

First of all thank you guys for your answers.

The problem is solved, got nearly 800 channels and all I was after is now there (Mediaset included).

By the way, the set I got is this:
_http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=218642&criteria=Satellite%20kit&doy=22m8

Stupid me, or just newbie me! My girlfriend and I were looking at your posts, then she asked to try the preset Hotbird 1,2,3,4, that I had replaced with a new satellite created by me (that I correctly named HB 6 7A 8) and boom! Everything came through correctly.

Basically the odd thing I was noticing was that when I scanned this custom sat created by me all the ~50 transponders had a low first value (e.g. 3490 V 27500, 4100 V H 27490 etc - nothing in the 10k and 11k areas) and this was plain suspicious. As I said 445 channels had come in fine, but a whole bunch were just missing!

Looking at the settings of the preset Hotbird sat (with the outdated name) the LNB Freq is Universal(9750-10600). The sat I added (because I was being fussy about the name) had the LNB Freq set to 5150. Not knowing much I had no idea this could have affected the whole scan. So I didn't touch anything.

And here we go, I learned something. Thank you again!

 

[svedish]

And I just got 2 points because I posted a live link! ahah. Sorry I ignored the restriction.

 

[Robbo]

Oh well, at least you got it working

The lower frequncies were C -band, the reason you still got some channels is that the local oscillator frequency is also lower, giving you Intermediate frequencies in the right range.

 

[svedish]

Yeah, was guessing that that low number in the LNB settings (5150) was the reason for all those low frequencies in the TP scan and the absence of frequencies over 10k.

To answer to rolfw, I had read that post before and realized that the only way to get the skew right was placing a laptop in front of the TV and another one near me on the roof with the webcams on and the signal quality-strenght screen up on the TV. That way I managed to skew the LNB and watch the results in real time until I found the best I could get out of it, i.e. 75-80% and yes...the angle was absolutely different from what I've read on dishpointer dot com (no live link, see? ).

By the way, just out of pure curiosity...How important is it to get the main bracket perfectly vertical? I mean, if the bracket is not straight, do you screw up the whole installation completely, or is there always a chance to fix this using rotation, elevation and skew?

Thanks again guys.

 

[Analoguesat]

On a fixed dish installation having the pole completely vertical isnt quite so important. It is critically importanta for motorised dishes though.

 

[Robbo]

Yep, it can be as wonky as hell (fixed installation), makes adjustment a bit trickier though.

 

[svedish]

Thanks guys. This helps. Will keep it in mind should I choose to upgrade my system to a motorized one.

Have a good one.