The 180cm dish is probably a good dish for the price but there are a few issues that would not make it the best dish for someone getting started. The first and foremost is it probably doesn't easily mount to the more common H to H motors and even if it could be adapted to mount to one is likely too heavy for the ones that are readily available. So, if you were going to use it youd likely have to use it as a fixed dish or youd have to get somekind of polar mount and use a linear actuator and if you did this youd need something to control the linear actuator as linear actuators and motors for larger dishes need different control signals. So youd then need either, a separate box, an old analog reciever, or something like the Vbox or Vbox II to control the actuator.
Another issue with the 180cm dish is that it's a prime focuse dish and prime focus dishes have lower F/d ratios than offset dishes. This means they need different feedhorns to match their F/D ratio. So youd need to find and purchase a feedhorn and LNB or LNBs to work well with this dish. The traditional LNBFs (LNBF is a feedhorn and LNB made together as one piece) are generally made and optimised for offset dishes which have a much higher F/d ratio. Therefore the performance would suffer quite a bit and the 180cm dish might not perform any bette (or much better) than a smaller dish if you didn't use an appropriate feed assembly on it. Also, if you had any idea of trying to get C-band on the dish youd need to get a feedhorn that does both C and Ku which means youd need something like a corotor or bullseye type feedhorn.
Anyway, the 180cm dish could perhaps be part of a fairly decent FTA system but youd have to spend more on the feedhorn and LNBs and youd have to spent more to motorise the dish and by the time you got through youd probably be better off getting a right proper BUD that's at least 8.5' of larger as a 120cm dish isn't really optimal for C band.
One thing you might want to look at is getting an old 40" x 30" primestar or 1.0M or 1.2M channel master dish and using it for a motorised Ku only setup. If you look around you might be able to find one locally for cheap or even free form someone who used to subscribe to primestar before they went out of business and has yet to remove the old dish from their yard. You can also sometimes find old BUDs that way, but a BUD will me more work, cost more, and may be a bit more complicated to get up and working for someone new to FTA.
