BM, Journey, I've not had a good large dish before. The Winegard 3m was fine for C band but only a couple of dB better than the 1.5m on ku. That may have been more due to the LNB and co-rotor 2 though. It was a very deep dish and probably not illuminated fully on ku.
I have the same (or similar ) drum for the 3.1 Patriot I installed many, many moons ago.
I welded it to some angle iron at the correct declination and onto an Ajak H-to H motor. It's still in the garden as I cant be bothered to move it around to the front of the house.
Yours if needed.
Many thanks for the kind offer. I found a couple of references to it:
Disaster!!
What systems you got then.
Have you any pics of the whole thing on the drum?
I finally got the 3.8 drum out of the car. It is about 750mm diameter.
I got this because it was there (and Ebay failed st1 et al) so now I have some problems. I would prefer to have full az-el with PC control to allow non-geo tracking and maybe moonbounce. BM's favourite,
Prositel, looks good but too much for me. Amongst the SPID pictures on RF Ham Design's site is this one
http://www.rfhamdesign.com/images/big245417a38b1270a135.jpg however, it does not look as heavy as my 3.8. I like the balanced approach shown in this
data sheet from RFHamDesign although I'd rather it were made from something a bit heavier and rustproof. The balancing weight etc may push the vertical weight over 300kg which is getting more awkward. It will also be much easier to build the 3.8 bird bath style as per manual if it is on an az-el. Being able to park it in the bird bath position will also minimise wind loading.
I've also got the problem of a position for it. The location of the old Winegard it not bad but limited to +/-50 degrees due to trees. Even then, there will be some excess ground noise from those trees at lower elevations. Whilst the trailer idea is tempting, I will have trouble getting it from a safe storage location to the clear sky location. I don't have John's set-up where it could live in a garage and come out Thunderbirds style. More thought required. In the meantime I need to finish the CM1.8