tv says weak signal

jeallen01

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Question: did the dish originally have just a single-output LNB fitted? If so, the additional weight of the replacement quad LB may just have caused the LNB arm to sag a little and thus slightly misaligned the LNB wrt the signal reflected back from the dish, especially if the original installation was not spot-on - certainly a known problem when a much heavier Octo LNB is fitted.

Certainly rain fade was a known issue with Zone 1 LNB installations quite a few years ago, so that is why I installed first a 60cm elliptical (on 25-30m of WF100) at the end of the garden and now a Zone 2 dish much nearer on the conservatory roof. OTOH, as has been said, nowadays the signal is far stronger and even a slightly misaligned dish should get a decent signal almost all of the time.
 

Ghostleader

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The Webro shotgun cable is good there's an urban myth about 15 metres being its top length run but I've used it at 25 metres and its been fine for received signal levels.

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jeallen01

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Moral/solution: accurate alignment, including correct setting of the LNB skew, and good quality cable (nowadays I will not use anything other than copper cored, screened and shielded, foam filled WF100 or similar, but some of the old air-cored & RG6 cable parts of the system still seem to work OK), but even then, with today's 28E signal levels, almost any crap cable and installation should work. My main suspect for poor signal would therefore be poor installation, or water ingress into the cable.

PS: are all the F-plugs correctly and securely fitted? Can make the difference between a good signal and none at all.
 

Terryl

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Also if water did get into one of the outside "F" connectors and you have the copper plated steel center conductor it could have rusted, this will cause all sorts of signal problems.
 
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