360? Coverage with 1 Arm?

[TopRamen]

360 degree Coverage with 1 Arm?

So, I'm working on this Dish that my school has, and it can't go 360 degrees. Is that normal? Or did they just install a wimpya$$ arm on it.

i just got a BRAND NEW (ok... barely used... not even a year old) actuator arm, and so maybe i can use it?

maybe there's no satellites to the north and i'm just a dumba$$.

What can i do?

i have pictures of it here: http://www.djzooky.com/dishpix/

 

[charper1]

No way on 360 degrees EVER. Your best deal might be 180 degree with a H-H mount, but more likely 150 degree sweep. But due to horizons 150 is about all you can realistically hope for, depending on your location. Do you have a 24" arm?

 

[carload]

Your suspicion is correct, TopRamen. You won't find dependable TV signals if you point your US-based dish north.

Quick science lesson: Orbiting satellites are really always falling, and just happen to be going forward fast enough that (at their current speed) their descent matches the curvature of the earth. Geosynchronous satellites appear to "hold still" in the sky, but really they're orbiting/falling too.

The only place where they can do that, fall at the perfect speed (24 hours per orbit) so they stay in one place relative to a point on earth's surface, is above the equator at a particular height (22,250 miles). This zone is known as the Clarke Belt, named for Arthur C. Clarke, who figured all this out years before the first artificial satellite was launched.

Therefore, if you want to point at a geosynchronous satellite, you need to point south from the northern hemisphere, or point north from the southern hemisphere.

 

[TopRamen]

aha! thank you carload!