Motorizing skew?

[7mdish]

Hi everybody, my prime focus dish is installed on top of a motor (Egis, Nitec in past years) that is great but doesn't perform any inclination adjustment when the dish movesto East or West. Just 2 movement: azimuth and elevation. So, until now I used mechanical polariser to set skew for each satellite. Now I would like to replace my old polarotor with more modern universal LNB but my problem would be skew. What about motorizing it? My goal is to find a good little DC motor to rotate entirely feedhorn/LNB block on itself by 180 degrees to set skew remotely from my home, as we make during first dish setup (we rotate the LNB looking for maximum signal before hard screwing bolts). I need a little and slow motor to perform a fine skew tuning, perhaps having a pulse option to use a normal positioner to control it. If not, a normal DC motor with manual control would be OK. And obviously I need mechanical parts to maintain LNB exactly focused on the dish when rotating it, to avoid signal loss. Probably I must build something on myself.... Any opinion and idea would be very appreciated. Thank you.

 

[Trust]

search for Smartsat (australia) and Crystop (Karlsruhe )
They have such systems for mobile homes .
A German satshop developt a system for flanged lnb's with regular servo motor from RC- car/plane equipment .
Controlled by cheap servo-tester ( Conrad )

 

[7mdish]

Sorry for delay, but just today I had time to visit these web sites. Very interesting. They seem mobile satellite system manufacturers, probably it is a good idea looking at this market to solve my problem. I will contact both, hoping to solve in Germany (well, Australia is too far....). Any new idea is very appreciated. Thank you.

 

[kingkad]

Something I wanted to do but never got round to:

http://www.satellites.co.uk/forums/threads/motorised-skew-adjustment-any-ideas.157999/

 

[7mdish]

Oh I missed your previous thread. Very interesting. What is your experience? Did you try that? Probably it's not easy but not impossible, and I believe that a good home-made solution would be the best way. Well, I think that skewing the entire dish is not a good idea, surely not in my situation because I use a very strong and solid motor and I don't want to modify it, it's too risky. So I must going on to the LNB side. As I said, now I perform skew with a mechanical polariser that makes a good job but it has a massive signal loss, so my goal is to install a better LNB without loosing skew. Hoping to test something in next Spring. If you will attempt something new please let me know. Thank you.

 

[kingkad]

I also wanted to skew the LNB, not the dish.

This is the design I made:
http://www.satellites.co.uk/forums/attachments/draw-jpg.53205/

Check my second post in that thread. I think its a workable solution.