Prime Focus from Maplins, any good?

L

leespencer

Member
My Satellite Setup
1.2m Dish with twin Chess LNB. Humax Foxsat HDR. Laptop computer.
My Location
Andalucia, Spain
Hi all,

is there any recognised differences between fibre glass prime focus dishes and pressed ali offset dishes in terms of effeciency?

My client here in Spain is considering a 2.4m prime focus dish from Maplins. Are they any good?

Thanks.

Lee.
 
Ah, after a closer examination I see the dish he is thinking of is actually metal, but made up of several pieces.

New question, are multi piece dishes any good?

Ta.
 
Nothing wrong with multi section dishes, as long as they are substantial and well made, unfortunately the Fortecstar dish sold by Maplin is neither of these, it is very flimsy and not well made.
 
Absolutely - don't touch Maplin's dish with a bargepole: Expensive scrap after a few storms.
 
Very flimsy. I was asked to setup a 1.8m for a customer. I couldn't get it to perform any better than my own TD110. Even after I threw the instructions away.

They are very flimsy, and not very well made.

If anyone had the time and inclination I reckon one could be suitably modified to perform. But it would be a very home brew mod.

I really suggest you persuade your client away from it.
 
The Fortec 2.4m is a big floppy wobbly metal jelly. Horrible rubbish. I too have had the misfortune to touch one.
 
lol,lol,lol...you guys know naf all i have a 2.4m fortec in worksop north notts uk and am getting full 24/7 reception of nilesat including the horizontals...its been up all through winter with no probs at all...perfoming brilliantly!! the people who slag em off are novices who dont have a clue how to set a dish up....
 
Aye right. One of our long time members had one - it disintegrated in a Welsh gale and was removed in bin bags!

Do you work for someone who sells this junk?? ;)
 
Lets see over 30000 posts for one member and nearly 5000 posts for the other against your 14 who would you believe?

Fortec Star equipment is expensive sh*te. Its badly made and has high failure rates. I also work in the industry as does Robbo and Rolf so you could say we have a good idea of what were talking about :-annoy

I have had the pleasure of setting up one of these 180cm sectional dishes for a client in France. It was tested against the clients existing 130cm dish which i think was a Televes branded dish :confused:

The fact it was bright orange might have been the biggest give away :D

The Televes branded dishes walked all over it. I spent a day adjusting the sections and everything else i could think of and it was still in my opinon a very poorly built dish. I just gave up in the end and told the client to take it back to maplins when he went back to the UK :-ohcrap

I then spent the rest of the evening drinking the local wine offereing from the region, to get over the disapointment of the crappy dish i had just wasted 9 hrs on 'O'-red

The best thing to use a Fortecstar dish for is making a rather nice Paella in, it might also be good for Sky if you live in the UK :-lmao

:-beer

Nano
 
sorry guys if these dishes are set up properly they work fine...i also have a 1.8 fortec which gets the horizontals 10pm onwards...for the record i work for avc..and have been an enthusiast for 25 years..and have the ability to set em up properly.....a guy near me has a 1.2m cm and he cant get as strong a signal as i can on my 1.8m fortec period...how many of you can get showtime in northern uk???? answer,none of you..yet you slag a dish off which some of us can get to work....any of you are welcome to drop by and see the results for yourself....i
 
How long did it take for you to set the 1.8m dish up, let alone the 2.4m?
 
I gave up after 9 hrs. They are truly appalling dishes to setup. I have no doubt they could be made to perform if you could be bothered to spend a good weekend on it, but i myself prefer just to buy a decent dish in the first place and use the time saved for more important things in life.

I have set up an STI 2.4m mesh dish which performed well with fairly good levels with very little adjustment, although it wasn't that much better built than the FortecStar unit and probably wouldn't withstand any major gusts.

:-beer

Nano
 
over a period of a couple of days to fine tune both dishes...the 1.8 is now on 26e....i will admit you cannot just slap em together and expect great results...the key to these dishes is getting the focal point spot on...the focal length i have is different to the instructions manual...and also lnb choice can make a difference...i first tried an inverto lnb and found it poor..i then changed to an invacom lnb which gave me far better results,and this is what i,v stuck with...they are not the best made dishes around,but for 180 quid against over a grand for a cm there was only 1 choice for me...
 
terriers said:
a guy near me has a 1.2m cm and he cant get as strong a signal as i can on my 1.8m fortec period...
Click to expand...

Well, it would be rather difficult since the 1.8 is twice the area. I would be surprised if you got anywhere near double the gain of any SMC dish, but nevertheless, congratulations for sticking up for something you like.

A Channel Master of either size however is going to last ten years without any real maintenance. The Fortecstar (or is it a Jonsa ?) would be unlikely to survive much more than three without a good shakedown and maybe new bolts.

Why not take a couple of pictures and post them here ?
 
terriers said:
over a period of a couple of days to fine tune both dishes
Click to expand...
I think that's the important difference. As a hobbyist you're prepared to put the hours in**; a professional can't afford this sort of time commitment. Time is money and a customer is not going to look favourably on a thousand pound bill for installation of a £180 dish!
terriers said:
...the focal length i have is different to the instructions manual...
Click to expand...
I have heard this before. To me this exemplifies how less than optimum they are!

**As a hobbyist I am quite prepared to waste hours to save pennies myself. This is sometimes part of the enjoyment!
 
i heard a lot of bad reports on these dishes before i bought one,and cos i wanted nilesat and could not afford a cm,i had to go for the fortec...i also thought surely if they were that bad why would they sell em,and bought one regardless..to be honest i love messing about with it trying to squeeze that bit more performance out of it,and get a buzz when i,m successful,i still think i can get a bit more out of it with a bit more tinkering....
there is no way i would put 1 in for a customer,cos of set up time ,and would love a 2.4 cm if funds would allow...but until then my fortec is doing a good job....
i will take some pics over the weekend and upload them so you can have a butcher,s
 
I have to agree with you terriers, it is the time needed to set up one of these monstrocities properly that is the problem. A proper dish does not need time wasted on it, it will work 'out of the box'. Still think that they are a pile of crap though, and not worth the bother unless you are desperate.
 
I agree, as said in my earlier post, that i reckon that these dishes could be made to perform well, but the OP is talking about setting one up for a client. And that would take too much time, and be vunerable to something going wrong.

I sometimes do find myself tempted to get hold of a 2.4m, just to see what I can do with it. But never again will I install one for a customer.
 
hello to all,
in effect the offset is supposed to be better than a prime focus.
if you have a 2 meter offset and a 2 meter prime the offset has a higher gain.
thats what the tests say.
but if you have a bum (poorly made) offset and a good prime the prime may work better.
ralph
 
If a prime-focus dish and off-set dish have the same F/D ratio then, by the laws of physics, they will have the same gain. There will be a slight advantage to the off-set as the LNB and arm won't be shading the dish but otherwise they will be the same.

The thing is that they generally aren't the same. The deeper a dish is, the lower is its gain. Why would anyone not want a dish to have as much gain as possible? Well, the problem is that a shallow (high gain) dish has poorer rejection of unwanted signals from the side compared to a deep dish and sometimes it's more important to reject the interference.

A little bit off-topic but it gives a bit of background to "off-set versus prime-focus" argument.
 
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