Easiest / Strongest Satellite to aim at from Central Florida ?

[singkwan2004]

OK I finally have SOME bit more positive news to share but still in trouble with why I am having problems.

I went and borrowed my neighbors linear LNB which is a known good LNB and stuck it on my arm mount and threw it up on the dish and aligned and found G19 within 3 minutes VERY easily. His is a basic VERY cheapy $10 linear LNB with 0.5 db noise rating. The one I have is supposed to be a better XTREME II from my research on this forum with 0.3 db noise rating. Hooray I got a bird with his cheapo LNB! I then proceeded to really fine tune and align the dish as perfectly as possible down to the oomph degree. The sad news that even with properly skewing the dish (I left the LNB at 0 and skewed the entire dish 26 degrees) I still was only getting a signal of 80 and a Quality of mid 30's at maximum. I really seriously fine tuned skew and tilt and direction and that was the absolute best on the strongest G19 transponder which for me happened to be 11898. Then I went inside and did a full blindscan and got about 20 to 30 channels only. All the channels on transponder 11898 worked fine in the mid 30 for quality but all the other transponders had quality of 10-12 and would not display a viewable video feed. Also many transpoders listed on lyngsat were plain missing. So anyway I saved the results of the blindscan and then went outside and very very carefully removed his LNB and very carefully replaced it with my XTREME II LNB and made sure to skew the LNB at zero using the marking on the side. Tightened up and very carefully refintuned everything and went back in side. Hooray I was able to detect and lock on G19 but the BAD news is my LNB was giving way LESS quality than his cheap junk. His LNB says 0.5 noise and mine says 0.3 noise. Yet on 11898 TP his LNB was getting 34-35 and mine is getting barely 10-12. On the other TP's where his was getting 10-12 mine is now fluctuating between 0-2. This is FRUSTRATING to say the least but I am patient and am keeping my cool and happily taking the challenge and tinkering along diligently and looking for more advice.

Everyone keeps saying that 30"x24" is more than big enough but I am not sure. I have a totally clear view of the sky. No lines, no trees, no houses, NOTHING at all in front of me. The only other thing could be that the LNB is not at the correct focal length on the arm of the dish or not at the correct focal point on the dish. I use the original Dish Network LNB and have everything on my custom mount and linear LNB pretty much exactly lined up with the specs from the Dish Network original LNB.

What else can I try? Why is his cheapo LNB getting better quality than my LNB?
But even his is getting max of mid 30's for quality? I am using the Viewsat Ultra (not Ultra Lite) with the original factory bin file from viewsatusa.com and the default sat file. I have used this STB for over a year on some other circular polarity stuff and it works just fine. I will confirm this by taking it over to my neighbors house later on and jacking into his dish just to make sure. As you can probably tell I am pretty technical and a very analytical thinker but there must be something simple I am missing due to lack of as much experience as you guys. Yes I can go out and buy a nice fat 39" dish and it may solve the problem but where is the challenge in that? I should be getting higher than mid 30's with my 30x24 and my good quality LNB right?

Help me pros. Help me. What am I missing??

Your LNBF maybe not good, remembered one time I got this same type of LNBF from distributor and all not work, have to got another model to replace those.
I am still thinking your LNBF pointing too high and the focal point is not quite correct. Thats why you could not get better quality from your neihbour cheap lnbf.

 

[user786]

your "crazy idea" sounds quite logical to me:up:up

Success at last !!!!!!!! Jim S and ynnedibanez hit the nail on the head.
I went outside and aimed the dish for the best possible signal I could get.
Then I unscrewed the lnb mount and freehand moved around up down forward back the LNB along the arm of the dish and boom I got q in the mid 30's and locked on solid to G19. I fine tuned everything and got the exact strongest spot and tigthened up the LNB, bent the mount bracket slightly and used 2 washers to raise it a little and what I have a lock on every G19 transponder listed on lyngsat. My strongest transponder is 12090 and I am getting S of 80 and Q of 65. A few transponders have a Q of 50 - 52 and most of the rest are aroun 35 - 37. I have fine tuned the skew and azimuth and elevation with extreme precision and tightened down everything. Do these Q numbers sound like what I should be getting on G19 from a dish500+ 30"x24" elliptical with an XTREME II LNB and a Viewsat Ultra STB from Florida 34741 area? Or am I still missing something else that should be getting me higher Q numbers?

Everyone's help was GREATLY appreciated. I feel like I am now ready to go out and conquer the rest of the sats in the sky it will be lots of loosening and tightening and turning manually without a motor though.....At least I learnt the right way and hard way from experience now and even understand the extreme importance of focal point and focal length which I had zero experience on from before. Now I think I am well groomed and prepared to step up to better dish and LNB's and motor in the future when I can afford it. I will be going directly to a 90 cm dish I think.

So what is the sat with the most feeds I should try to aim at next with the most English language stuff on it? Don't forget to give some thoughts on my G19 signal and quality numbers I quoted above.

THANKS to all of you!

 

[Tron]

Glad you were able to improve the quality. Have you found the sweet spot? You should move the LNBF in and out from the dish, as well as slightly up and down to nail it down. When you are fabricating an LNBF holder, there's always a lot of experimentation to be done ... Just be sure to move the LNBF VERY slowly, and watch the quality meter as you do so. Have fun!

 

[ynnedibanez]

some of my favorite sats are, 30w, 83w, 97w, and 101w
on 30w, watch for cubavision and ktv2
cubavision is in spanish, but it shows good movies in english with spanish subtitles quite often, you just have to ignore the words in spanish at the bottom of the screen
same deal with ktv2 only the words are in arabic (i think its arabic anyway)
83w has rtv and tuff tv
you already know whats on 97w
101w has hist and bio (they scan in as test 11 and test 12)
you will likely find more, but we are not supposed to post channels that are not in one of the two links below in this forum, so ill leave that to you to find
you got plenty of fun scanning the skies ahead of you
these two links will give you info on some of what you can expect on each satellite
SatelliteGuys.US - TheList
Free TV from United States - LyngSat
and this one will help you find the sats,
Satellite Finder / Dish Pointing Calculator with Google Maps | DishPointer.com
have fun!!
Denny

 

[delta_charlie]

Success at last !!!!!!!! Jim S and ynnedibanez hit the nail on the head.
I went outside and aimed the dish for the best possible signal I could get.
Then I unscrewed the lnb mount and freehand moved around up down forward back the LNB along the arm of the dish and boom I got q in the mid 30's and locked on solid to G19. I fine tuned everything and got the exact strongest spot and tigthened up the LNB, bent the mount bracket slightly and used 2 washers to raise it a little and what I have a lock on every G19 transponder listed on lyngsat. My strongest transponder is 12090 and I am getting S of 80 and Q of 65. A few transponders have a Q of 50 - 52 and most of the rest are aroun 35 - 37. I have fine tuned the skew and azimuth and elevation with extreme precision and tightened down everything. Do these Q numbers sound like what I should be getting on G19 from a dish500+ 30"x24" elliptical with an XTREME II LNB and a Viewsat Ultra STB from Florida 34741 area? Or am I still missing something else that should be getting me higher Q numbers?

Everyone's help was GREATLY appreciated. I feel like I am now ready to go out and conquer the rest of the sats in the sky it will be lots of loosening and tightening and turning manually without a motor though.....At least I learnt the right way and hard way from experience now and even understand the extreme importance of focal point and focal length which I had zero experience on from before. Now I think I am well groomed and prepared to step up to better dish and LNB's and motor in the future when I can afford it. I will be going directly to a 90 cm dish I think.

So what is the sat with the most feeds I should try to aim at next with the most English language stuff on it? Don't forget to give some thoughts on my G19 signal and quality numbers I quoted above.

THANKS to all of you!

Good job! Glad to read you got it sorted out.

Regarding feeds - most of the sport feeds I run across are in HD or 4:2:2 so you would need a HD/4:2:2 receiver to display them.

Most of the news feeds are still in plain DVB SD. 99 west has the CBS Newspath feed and it has been showing the deep horizons oil well leak - can be very interesting to watch.

72 west might be another to checkout.

Enjoy, DC