Sat Motor..How does it work

R

RichardinSpain

Regular Member
My Satellite Setup
Sky 1.5 m FTE dish Amiko Alien SHD8900 receiver, Gigablue Quad
& 80cm dish for Nilesat or badr with Amstrad sky receiver
Dreambox 500s motsat3 motor
My Location
Totana Murcia Spain
Ok haven't got a motor yet but reading up a lot before i get one. I have read loads of good set up guides so don't think i would have any difficulty in setting one up...but what i'm trying to understand is how the motor works...I understand that the motor will go from E to W to find the desired satellite once you have input your own lat & long thats easy enough to understand but how does it know what elevation to go to and also how does it know how much to rotate the dish for the skew?? Is this already programmed into the receivers software?
Cheers Rich
 
Elevation and Skew follow naturally and automatically as Azimuth changes owing to a combination of the locus described by the motor stub and the attitude of the motor in relation to the mount (ie As adjusted for latitude).

All this is done through the mechanical design of the motor and its stub. Once it's correctly installed to fix a point on the arc (Usually making use of your South Satellite - but not strictly necessary if using USALS), it will then track with little error except perhaps due to motor backlash (worn gearing) or to a mount which is not vertical.

The only function originated by the receiver is the Go To command which controls Azimuth (Bearing) and this interacts with positional information pre-stored in a circuit board within the motor.

In order to know how far to move the motor to achieve alignment to a particular Satellite for an installation at a given Latitude/Longitude, positions can either be stored manually (DiSEqC 1.2) or calculated via an algorithm (USALS, sometimes called DiSEqC 1.3).
 
Many thanks Tivu for the clear answer
 
I must try leaving out chunks of info in all my Posts!

See Edited version (Italic text).
 
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