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(First urge was to put this in "Dishes on holiday", but as this is *MY* dish on holiday, it stays here...)
The French Alps are very nice, we have been going there every summer for about 10 years now. We visit a smaller town - village to some - called La Clusaz south of Geneva, mid-way between Annecy and Chamonix.
However, *only* French TV, and just 4 channels of it, can be a bit - erh - tiresome. So this year, I decided to bring my Foxsat, and needed a travel dish to go with it.
As I'm in a normal car (estate Passat), I don't have the luxury of motorised fold-back dishes mounted on caravans, so I needed something agreeable to packing while keeping price down. All the while still having enough surface to receive 28.2E. After checking a bit about footprints, I decided that a 65 cm dish should be good enough to at least get stuff in good weather. Luckily, and almost incredibly, my measuring tape tells me that the spare wheel well in a Passat has diameter of 65 cm. Now there's a coincidence...
I bought a Triax TDA 64 mail order from Germany (lowest price), and after some deliberation decided to leave my Inverto Black Ultra at home, and therefore also purchased an Inverto multi-connect Quad LNB. (I need this for another setup later.)
Upon arrival, the dish turned out to just *almost* fit the spare wheel well. It's oval, and was just slightly too long to fit flat in the long dimension. But as the various brackets, LNB and cables needed to go in there as well, it fitted in at an angle resting on a cardboard box with the bracket bits in it. Bubble-wrapped it just in case...
I was originally considering buying a balcony-stand for the dish, but knowing the appartment I decided that it should be possible to use clamps to make a non-destructive temporary fixing of the dish to the balcony cladding. Less tubing to drive to France! So as a mount for the dish, I bought the cheapest L-bracket I could find locally (15 EUR). This turned out to be made from aluminum (or aluminium as you Brits would say), which is even better for the weight conscious.
To complement this, I brought with me two loops of coax cable (double screened but nothing special), a short run of coax, and an el-cheapo sat finder (the crude meter-cum-beeper model). And some tools (wrenches etc.)
Last bit of preparation was to check things very, very carefully on dishpointer.com. Although there is a (at least locally) famous mountain range just to the sout-east of La Clusaz called the Aravis, my gut feeling was that the Clarke belt cleared this just about. In the previous visits, I had seen several dishes on nieghbouring houses, and assuming they were all pointing to 13E, I figured that 28.2E would be OK.
After some 1600 kms on the road, the mount/dish/LNB went in after unpacking the car. First thought was to fit this on the outside of the balcony, but as I didn't want to raise protests from owners/neighbours, I fitted the dish on the inside of the balcony. From dishpointer.com, I established that the dish should be pointing just right of the top-end station of the local ski-lift to get 28.2E. Careful checking of the line-of-sight confirmed that it should indeed be possible to receive something.
Mounting took, maybe, 20 minutes. L-bracket clamped to board in balcony cladding, dish mounted on bracket, LNB on arm, cables screwed on and Foxsat connected via SCART to old'ish 4:3 LCD TV in apartment. Expectation were high.
Connecting the sat-meter on cable one (using the extra cable) confirmed that indeed there was some sort of signal. But the FoxSat saw nothing. Checked dishpointer.com alignment using mobile phone (don't want to think about data roaming costs), and dish was pointing just as it should. But no BBC or ITV or in fact anything at all.
(Missed the TV Exlorer II a lot at that point. I was pointing blindly at the sky, with no means of detecting where I was pointing... Bleah.)
Tried moving the dish back and forth a bit.. found another satellite signal, but still no luck. And I felt I must be several degrees off by now. Moved it back again, tried optimising the elevation and skew, but still no BBC from the position that dishpointer tells me is where it should be. Triple checked dishpointer. Everything seems right...
...
After maybe three hours of fiddling, and a wife suggesting that "maybe it just doesn't work", I decided to be a bit more drastic (desperate?), and moved the dish azimuth substantially left and right to see if there was anything at all there. And, hey presto!, moving the dish to the left there was a big signal, and BBC1 coming in loud and clear. AHA! :-righton The dish was now pointing substantially to the left of the ski-lift station, which was very much different from what dishpointer.com was showing me. I estimate at least 5 dgrees more East than was indicated on dishpointer.com.
Some slight optimizing with the sat-meter, and the "hand-held" adjustment of the skew to 12 degrees, and I have 100% signal strength and 90% signal quality on all 2D transponders. Some even an 100/100. That is FAR better than what I get on a Channel Master 180 in Denmark!
Rest of week passed with full signal - we even had massive thunderstorm over the mounting range in mid-week, and no signal fade *whatsoever*!!! I must confess to feeling very miffed about having a fringe-reception experience where the dish-mounting (disregarding aligment) took 20 minutes and uses a 65cm alu-dish, and with 100/90 reception, whereas back home I've spent months finding the right 180cm dish and digging massive holes by hand just to get *reasonable* quality reception, with rain-fade and what have you. Grrr!
All that was left at the end of the week was to pack down the dish (took 10 minutes), and stick it back in the spare wheel well of the car along with the bracket. Thanks to bubble wrap, it is now still intact, waiting for another outing.
Next year perhaps.
Lessons learned:
1) 65 cm triax dish quite enough to get everything at 28.2E (with an Inverto multi-connect LN
when in France.
2) Dishpointer.com is by far not that accurate; just relying on imagery to align dish is not enough.
3) An el-cheapo sat-meter can get you very, very far except when you're pointing a the wrong sat.
4) Receiving 2D on a 65cm dish 1000 km outside of Britain is actually quite annyoing when you're from Denmark!
st1
The French Alps are very nice, we have been going there every summer for about 10 years now. We visit a smaller town - village to some - called La Clusaz south of Geneva, mid-way between Annecy and Chamonix.
However, *only* French TV, and just 4 channels of it, can be a bit - erh - tiresome. So this year, I decided to bring my Foxsat, and needed a travel dish to go with it.
As I'm in a normal car (estate Passat), I don't have the luxury of motorised fold-back dishes mounted on caravans, so I needed something agreeable to packing while keeping price down. All the while still having enough surface to receive 28.2E. After checking a bit about footprints, I decided that a 65 cm dish should be good enough to at least get stuff in good weather. Luckily, and almost incredibly, my measuring tape tells me that the spare wheel well in a Passat has diameter of 65 cm. Now there's a coincidence...
I bought a Triax TDA 64 mail order from Germany (lowest price), and after some deliberation decided to leave my Inverto Black Ultra at home, and therefore also purchased an Inverto multi-connect Quad LNB. (I need this for another setup later.)
Upon arrival, the dish turned out to just *almost* fit the spare wheel well. It's oval, and was just slightly too long to fit flat in the long dimension. But as the various brackets, LNB and cables needed to go in there as well, it fitted in at an angle resting on a cardboard box with the bracket bits in it. Bubble-wrapped it just in case...
I was originally considering buying a balcony-stand for the dish, but knowing the appartment I decided that it should be possible to use clamps to make a non-destructive temporary fixing of the dish to the balcony cladding. Less tubing to drive to France! So as a mount for the dish, I bought the cheapest L-bracket I could find locally (15 EUR). This turned out to be made from aluminum (or aluminium as you Brits would say), which is even better for the weight conscious.
To complement this, I brought with me two loops of coax cable (double screened but nothing special), a short run of coax, and an el-cheapo sat finder (the crude meter-cum-beeper model). And some tools (wrenches etc.)
Last bit of preparation was to check things very, very carefully on dishpointer.com. Although there is a (at least locally) famous mountain range just to the sout-east of La Clusaz called the Aravis, my gut feeling was that the Clarke belt cleared this just about. In the previous visits, I had seen several dishes on nieghbouring houses, and assuming they were all pointing to 13E, I figured that 28.2E would be OK.
After some 1600 kms on the road, the mount/dish/LNB went in after unpacking the car. First thought was to fit this on the outside of the balcony, but as I didn't want to raise protests from owners/neighbours, I fitted the dish on the inside of the balcony. From dishpointer.com, I established that the dish should be pointing just right of the top-end station of the local ski-lift to get 28.2E. Careful checking of the line-of-sight confirmed that it should indeed be possible to receive something.
Mounting took, maybe, 20 minutes. L-bracket clamped to board in balcony cladding, dish mounted on bracket, LNB on arm, cables screwed on and Foxsat connected via SCART to old'ish 4:3 LCD TV in apartment. Expectation were high.
Connecting the sat-meter on cable one (using the extra cable) confirmed that indeed there was some sort of signal. But the FoxSat saw nothing. Checked dishpointer.com alignment using mobile phone (don't want to think about data roaming costs), and dish was pointing just as it should. But no BBC or ITV or in fact anything at all.
(Missed the TV Exlorer II a lot at that point. I was pointing blindly at the sky, with no means of detecting where I was pointing... Bleah.)Tried moving the dish back and forth a bit.. found another satellite signal, but still no luck. And I felt I must be several degrees off by now. Moved it back again, tried optimising the elevation and skew, but still no BBC from the position that dishpointer tells me is where it should be. Triple checked dishpointer. Everything seems right...
...
After maybe three hours of fiddling, and a wife suggesting that "maybe it just doesn't work", I decided to be a bit more drastic (desperate?), and moved the dish azimuth substantially left and right to see if there was anything at all there. And, hey presto!, moving the dish to the left there was a big signal, and BBC1 coming in loud and clear. AHA! :-righton The dish was now pointing substantially to the left of the ski-lift station, which was very much different from what dishpointer.com was showing me. I estimate at least 5 dgrees more East than was indicated on dishpointer.com.
Some slight optimizing with the sat-meter, and the "hand-held" adjustment of the skew to 12 degrees, and I have 100% signal strength and 90% signal quality on all 2D transponders. Some even an 100/100. That is FAR better than what I get on a Channel Master 180 in Denmark!
Rest of week passed with full signal - we even had massive thunderstorm over the mounting range in mid-week, and no signal fade *whatsoever*!!! I must confess to feeling very miffed about having a fringe-reception experience where the dish-mounting (disregarding aligment) took 20 minutes and uses a 65cm alu-dish, and with 100/90 reception, whereas back home I've spent months finding the right 180cm dish and digging massive holes by hand just to get *reasonable* quality reception, with rain-fade and what have you. Grrr!
All that was left at the end of the week was to pack down the dish (took 10 minutes), and stick it back in the spare wheel well of the car along with the bracket. Thanks to bubble wrap, it is now still intact, waiting for another outing.
Next year perhaps.
Lessons learned:
1) 65 cm triax dish quite enough to get everything at 28.2E (with an Inverto multi-connect LN
when in France.2) Dishpointer.com is by far not that accurate; just relying on imagery to align dish is not enough.
3) An el-cheapo sat-meter can get you very, very far except when you're pointing a the wrong sat.
4) Receiving 2D on a 65cm dish 1000 km outside of Britain is actually quite annyoing when you're from Denmark!
st1
