I might as well throw in my two pennyworth here. I live in Valencia which is a notorious area for Sky reception from Astra. Just 20 miles to the north people are able to get sky with no problem on 1.5m dishes but here and to the south of here reception drops off like a stone.
When I first arrived several years ago I set up a Tagra 1.2 solid dish with Invacom lnb and connected it all to my Pace 2600 skybox. Although the signal did not lock I did get a fair few channels in the daytime but at night only the very strongest channels came in and none of those was what I really wanted to watch.
I saw an ad for the Fortecstat 2,4 dish and decided as it was not really that expensive it would be worth a go – so I bought one and lugged it up on to my roof to assemble it. And so the first problems came to light. The dish is not what I would call a precision made object. Many of the holes to bolt the petals together simply did not line up. Much swapping of petals to get the best fit do not help much and I ended up having to ream out several holes to get the petals to clamp together. Then I noticed the shape of some petals did not follow exactly the shape of the next due to the poor way the petals were folded at the edges so I ended up truing the rims by carefully clamping them together along the whole side of the petals then bolting them up using larger washers on both sides to make sure they did not further distort the petals.
Eventually the dish was complete and was checked with cross wires to ensure it was true – it was not and so much re-clamping and re-bolting resulted to get it true. I was starting to regret this purchase.
Once it was on its stand and in position (and that takes three people to do) it was checked again for alignment and then the LNB stays and holder were attached. Finally I adjusted the focus and skew for max signal and went down to see if there was any improvement over the Tagra – and there was. At last the signal locked and I could tune into almost all the sky channels – great – at last I was feeling something was going right but later that night the channels all started to drop off one by one until all I could get is the main sky news, a few shopping channels and ITV TTS – I was gutted.
Over the next few day I very carefully adjusted the dish using cross wires again and with very careful nighttime adjusting using the weakest signals to tune the focus and skew by was able to get most channels to hold until about 7pm. However this was far less than my nearby friends were getting on 1.9m and 1.8m and even in one case 1.6m dishes.
No matter what I did I could not improve on the reception and decided it was better than what I had before and so could live with it – that was at least until the first gale of the winter which resulted in zero reception. On inspection the dish was badly warped and so I was faced with re-bolting and adjusting again. The next storm did exactly the same and after a third my patience was at an end – I was really hacked of with the dish.
On ebay I saw a posting for an Andrews 2.4 dish and decided I would wait a day or so then bid for it – it was a fair distance away but the dishes have a good reputation and if the price was right I would go for it. However events were to overtake me – that evening there was another storm and gales and in the morning as usual no signal. This time when I went onto the roof it was clear why. The top petals were bent almost in half, the lnb stays twisted and forced to the ground, the stand twisted and bent. In all I was looking at a pile of scrap metal.
Lucky my insurance company was sympathetic and agreed to help fund a new dish. This time I had a “proper” dish installed again 2.4m and ever since then have enjoyed 24/7 reception of virtually all channels, including the infamous BBC2 which my friends still tend to lose after about 9pm. I get 80-90% signal and between 60% and 100% quality depending on the channel. This compares with about 40-60% signal and 30-50% quality on the Fortecstar – all other components being identical.
SO – what about Fortecstar dishes – well they are cheap – there’s no doubt about that but they simply can’t outperform a good solid dish or even a good segmented one. However, if you are in an area not so fringe as my own then they might be suitable for your particular use – and as I have found myself, they can be better than a 1.2 solid dish and possibly better than a 1.4. It’s a case of the old adage – you pays your money and takes your pick – BUT if you do opt for one, make sure you are prepared to take a lot of time assembling and adjusting it and then protect it from the weather as these dishes simply cannot cope with gale force winds.
