Very annoying tuning/alignment issue

G

geakem

Member
My Satellite Setup
Rubbishy Aldi £50 job
Numerous servers, desktops and laptops. I'll resist boring you with the details.
My Location
Bristol
Hi all,

So I went to Aldi to pick up a £50 disn 'n' box for freesat. Mounted the dish and used a relative's pretty reasonable satellite finder to find Astra2A @ 28.2 (adjusted slightly for Bristol). Signal strength was weird though so I aligned it to Eurobird 1 (I believe they're practically in the same cluster). I tried finding a satellite (very) slightly east but couldn't find any dip/change in signal to go on so kept it on Eurobird 1.

Tried scanning in that position for Astra2A channels and nope nothing. 'box reports 8-10% signal quality for Astra2A and 60% for Eurobird 1.

I'm so frustrated because I don't know where to go from here. What can I do? Any help muchos appreciated! :)
 
Your dish isnt aligned correctly. Chances are you are on the wrong satellite cluster. Do you get any channels scanning at all? If so list half a dozen and we will tell you what you have found.
 
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these were from a scan of eurobird 1 although freqs
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looks like you are looking at Hot bird at 13e you need to swing it around about 15 degrees east and point it down a bit at around 22 degrees elavation then you should be on the money
 
Ay. Standard error - although most find Astra 1 at 19.2E.

No matter, finding any Satellite at all is tricky the first time ............... then it becomes instinctive.

"Eurobird 1" is just a data table ............ it is only of value when the satellite you are aligned to matches the data.

And frequencies etc are re-used across the arc, which is why you get some Hotbird channels showing up when selecting Eurobird: Because your dish is aligned to Hotbird.

So, this has gone from a "very annoying" issue to a "minor irritation, soon sorted"
 
thanks :)

i fiddled with it tonight and found Astra 1 @ 19.2. Interestingly that one's got about 55% signal quality, Astra 2 @ 28.2 ~20% but that bloody badr46 @ 26.0 ~60%!

It's odd - I've rewritten assembly and firmware, designed and fabricated a motherboard for a project at uni a few years ago but cant find 28.2! Got a bad feeling its to do with a cluster of trees though :/
 
Id be surprised if you are actually getting Badr 4 & 6 at that signal strength - their signal strengths arent particularly good in the UK. Chances are its just one of the other clusters - probably either 23.5E or 28E :D

Remember the same frequencies are reused over and over again all around the arc so if you scan Satellite A but your dish is actually pointing at Satellite B then it will happily scan all the scannels on Sat B wghere the frewuencies and other technical parameters coincide.

The only sure way of identifying which sat you have locked onto is seeing what channels appear after a scan (Unless you have specialised meters of course)
 
Got it! (eventually). Found ITV3 with a scan on 10906 but the quality's terrible and I can't get it any better with small adjustments. The wind is pretty bad tonight so I'll try again tomorrow and fingers crossed find something scannable! The problem seems to be the trees :(

If I can't get decent signal I'll get another dish and put it towards the roof so to avoid the trees. Although the current dish is so rawl bolted in that it clearly won't come off without an argument. Is there anything towards the west worth picking up? Sport/Films/anything to make this less of a waste! etc.
 
Most sport & film content is securely encrypted these days - the rights for these are expensive to acquire so the providers try to keep their encryptions screwed down.

Remember the dish doesnt need to be high up - it can go anywhere as long as theres good line of sight onto the satellites. therefore it could go in a quiet corner of the garden if required - as long as the kids or pets cant impale themselves on it!
 
And don't forget LNB skew ....................... Looking from LNB towards dish, slacken collar a tiny bit and twist LNB clockwise a few degrees until you get the best results for both H and V Channels.
 
A wet tea-towel over half the dish, and then fine tune with the remainder of the signal
 
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