It's kinda got an elevation scale, but it's pretty useless for any real purposes closer than about 10 degrees....
For the 9 millionth time - setting the elevation....
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Drboyd,
Okay, I follow you here with the reference to the north star (Polaris) and the way you are thinking of it makes sense. However, I would find it difficult to measure or judge this alignment. Primarily since you would have to be looking at this during the night so that Polaris would be visible to you. But, you have a good idea here.
I think that you are either trying to make the rest of it too difficult or you think that there is much more to it than what is stated. Don't try to figure the calculations out in your head or try to develop a theory or an equation to explain it all, just take the instructions for granted and go!
You can revisit this subject later and visualize it all with a different reference in your mind's eye.
RADAR
Yeah, I hear your lamentation regarding this aspect. Many dishes do not have a very refined angle marking system, a few might not have any. Here is where your inclinometer can be put to work for you, if you follow the right directions (refer to the reply from Brian at SatelliteAV regarding the straight edge set vertically across the rim of the dish reflector).
RADAR
Full disclosure: I'm a mechanical engineer, and when I can't figure out something like this down to the gnat's-@$$, it drive me ape-$%&!
PS: Thanks for all the help and your patience, everyone!!
Full disclosure: I'm a mechanical engineer, and when I can't figure out something like this down to the gnat's-@$$, it drive me ape-$%&!
PS: Thanks for all the help and your patience, everyone!!
LOL Drboyd! I certainly understand how you feel. Same as Einstein searching for that one inch long formula to explain the universe! Yes, wouldn't we all like to find that! Or win the Powerball Lottery when it is at 261 million dollars!
But, do we need that much money? Do we need that one inch formula for the Universe just to dial in a satellite? NO. We just need patience.
RADAR
Patience - yes - and I want it right now!! 
I've kinda taken a large bite here with this FTA stuff. Between all the junk, I have a pretty sizable chunk of cash tied up, and the only mounting place I can get away with is on the roof.... of my two-story house.
So, my hope is to get this thing dialed in to the point that I'm not sitin' up on the roof in 115 degrees all summer messing with it, or doing a power dive off if I happen to slip.
The guys that know what they're doing say they can set up a motor dish in 30 minutes.
Sounds like one of those jobs where the first one takes two days and the second one takes twenty minutes; I'm just trying to short-cut the learning curve.!
D
But yes, the powerball would be nice....
I've kinda taken a large bite here with this FTA stuff. Between all the junk, I have a pretty sizable chunk of cash tied up, and the only mounting place I can get away with is on the roof.... of my two-story house.
So, my hope is to get this thing dialed in to the point that I'm not sitin' up on the roof in 115 degrees all summer messing with it, or doing a power dive off if I happen to slip.
The guys that know what they're doing say they can set up a motor dish in 30 minutes.
Sounds like one of those jobs where the first one takes two days and the second one takes twenty minutes; I'm just trying to short-cut the learning curve.!
D
LOL Drboyd! I certainly understand how you feel. Same as Einstein searching for that one inch long formula to explain the universe! Yes, wouldn't we all like to find that! Or win the Powerball Lottery when it is at 261 million dollars!
But, do we need that much money? Do we need that one inch formula for the Universe just to dial in a satellite? NO. We just need patience.
RADAR
But yes, the powerball would be nice....
Patience - yes - and I want it right now!!
OH! I dang near busted my gut laughing after this! Don't fret, it was one of the best feelings I had in a long time! It was great DrBoyd! :up
I need to tell you thanks!
RADAR
Patience - yes - and I want it right now!!
I've kinda taken a large bite here with this FTA stuff. Between all the junk, I have a pretty sizable chunk of cash tied up, and the only mounting place I can get away with is on the roof.... of my two-story house.
So, my hope is to get this thing dialed in to the point that I'm not sitin' up on the roof in 115 degrees all summer messing with it, or doing a power dive off if I happen to slip.
The guys that know what they're doing say they can set up a motor dish in 30 minutes.
Sounds like one of those jobs where the first one takes two days and the second one takes twenty minutes; I'm just trying to short-cut the learning curve.!
D
But yes, the powerball would be nice....
Hang in there my friend! This stuff will click for you soon. You are either a bullhead or a carp. The bullhead nibbles and pecks at the hook, then drops it for a short time and comes right back to it and is eventually caught. The carp grabs the bait and runs like hell and strips your reel of all the line and leaves you gasping at what just happened.
Either one is good, which one are you? Pesky and persistant or run with the bait as fast as you can till you snap the line?
RADAR
For now just forget how and why some motor and angle formulas were invented and just set it up my the book or if thats not clear from your friends here.motor elevation set to your latitude and the dish elevation to the motor manufactures angle - the declination angle.My biggest problem was finding true south and tweaking in a signal from my true south satellite.After you get things to work then analyze all you want and why things are.You will get it!its just a matter of time.At one point when i was setting up mine and not getting any results i started to think that there were no satellites up in the sky and getting FTA programming was just a lie (which isn't true). I know how you must feel!i have been there. Stan
. I know how you must feel!i have been there. StanClearly, as evidenced by this thread and all my dumb questions, I'm a bullhead.
Although my wife would tell you that often I'm a something-else-head.
Although my wife would tell you that often I'm a something-else-head.
I agree with the carp description, but the bullheads can act like a somewhat dumb carp too. Years ago, when I went away to grad school, before I got my canoe to town, some friends said let's go JUG FISHING. I said what the heck is that? Turns out that these guys got together a couple dozen plastic milk jugs or clorox bottles, and on each, they'd tie a few feet of fishing line, with a baited hook on the end, then I bought a 5' one man rubber life raft, and paddled out into this lake after dark, while the other guys shined their car lights on the surface, and I set these jugs out on the water. Then I rowed back in, and everyone (except me) started drinking beer. They would take turns shining car lights out onto the lake to see if the jugs started moving. Sure enough, after a couple hours, one of the jugs started racing across the surface at a high rate. Looked like one of those water skiing squirrels you see movies of. So I started rowing out, trying to catch the darn thing. Pretty soon, the bullhead tired out enough for me to catch it, but then, I realized that I had forgotten to take any stringer or any way to secure the darn fish, so I had to hold it in one hand while trying to ROW back to shore with one oar, which ended up with me going pretty much in circles, unless I'd switch hands. THEN, somehow the darn fish slipped out of my hands, and the darn barb punctured a hole in the life raft, and I was losing air fast. Now I needed one hand to hold the fish, one hand to put my finger over the hole in the boat, and the third hand to row. Somehow, I managed to figure out how to do that all with only 2 hands, while the guys on shore were trying to figure out why in the heck I was going around in circles, and in some apparent death struggle with the darn fish, but they were too drunk to be anything but curious.
Anyway, that's my BULLHEAD story. Once they do grab the hook, they can take off like a carp, and take a clorox bottle for quite a ride across the surface... kind of like the JAWS movie when the shark was pulling those drums across the surface.
Now, to make this at least somewhat satellite related...... ??? no, can't think of ANYTHING.
I am fortunate my "true south" sat is AMC9. If you can lock RTV and get a strong signal you can lock almost anything no matter what the FEC is. Even started locking the weaker TPs on 97W with little to no rain fade. I am also using a WS9036 with an SG9120 Motor and a Fortec NA Classic reciever. I live in a mobile home so my mount is definitely plumb, the power pole my meter and phone box are mounted to. A plumb level mount is a must to track the Clark Belt properly.
To drboyddrboyd from a fellow ME
Not to confuse things further but I have a situation here. When I first added the motor to my setup I used Satmex 5 at 116.8W as my true south. I'm at 117.2W so this is pretty close. I tweaked this satellite for maximum Q and then started scanning others. Started with 125W, then added 83W and added others over a period of several weeks - I don't like to spend more than an hour or so at a time with this when I could be out riding my bike or paddling my kayak - but I digress.
As time went by I made small adjustments to the dish elevation and the true south alignment, gaining small improvements using a somewhat methodical approach. I would for example tune in Create on 125W, bring up the S and Q display on my Sonicview 8000, then go outside and push the dish up a few degrees momentarily and see which way the Q display went. Then I would tune in RTV on 83W and do the same thing. This approach allowed me to know where I was with respect to the satellite arc and thus to know whether to adjust the N-S alignment by rotating the whole assembly on the pole or to adjust the dish elevation. The latitude adjustment I had checked with an inclinometer on the motor base so I was confident that that was correct. The mount is also plumb within 0.2 degrees according to the same inclinometer - which I checked for accuracy using a surface plate and the method I learned for checking levels when I was a land surveyor many years ago.
The point of all this is that I eventually figured out that raising the dish elevation would improve the Q on all the satellites EXCEPT Satmex 5, which I now get no channels from at all. RTV went from zero Q to about 66%, Create from about 20% to 65%, and I now get Montana PBS on 125W - it didn't show up before I made this last tweak.
According to Lyngsat I should get a very strong signal from Satmex 5 and I can but when I set up for optimum reception on this one I degrade the signal from all the other ones.
As a mechanical engineer (now gratefully retired) who spent 30 years in the instrumentation end of things I have the same compulsion as drboyddrboyd to understand all this to the nth degree. In fact I find setting up and optimizing my system much more interesting than actually watching TV.
I'll be interested to hear if anyone has an idea what's happening here.
thanks,
John
Not to confuse things further but I have a situation here. When I first added the motor to my setup I used Satmex 5 at 116.8W as my true south. I'm at 117.2W so this is pretty close. I tweaked this satellite for maximum Q and then started scanning others. Started with 125W, then added 83W and added others over a period of several weeks - I don't like to spend more than an hour or so at a time with this when I could be out riding my bike or paddling my kayak - but I digress.
As time went by I made small adjustments to the dish elevation and the true south alignment, gaining small improvements using a somewhat methodical approach. I would for example tune in Create on 125W, bring up the S and Q display on my Sonicview 8000, then go outside and push the dish up a few degrees momentarily and see which way the Q display went. Then I would tune in RTV on 83W and do the same thing. This approach allowed me to know where I was with respect to the satellite arc and thus to know whether to adjust the N-S alignment by rotating the whole assembly on the pole or to adjust the dish elevation. The latitude adjustment I had checked with an inclinometer on the motor base so I was confident that that was correct. The mount is also plumb within 0.2 degrees according to the same inclinometer - which I checked for accuracy using a surface plate and the method I learned for checking levels when I was a land surveyor many years ago.
The point of all this is that I eventually figured out that raising the dish elevation would improve the Q on all the satellites EXCEPT Satmex 5, which I now get no channels from at all. RTV went from zero Q to about 66%, Create from about 20% to 65%, and I now get Montana PBS on 125W - it didn't show up before I made this last tweak.
According to Lyngsat I should get a very strong signal from Satmex 5 and I can but when I set up for optimum reception on this one I degrade the signal from all the other ones.
As a mechanical engineer (now gratefully retired) who spent 30 years in the instrumentation end of things I have the same compulsion as drboyddrboyd to understand all this to the nth degree. In fact I find setting up and optimizing my system much more interesting than actually watching TV.
I'll be interested to hear if anyone has an idea what's happening here.
thanks,
John
Well, you say that you're confident that the latitude adjustment is correct. If that is correct (and as usual, I have my suspicions relative to whether you used the modified method or used the traditional charts), then, if you have peaked the dish elevation on your true south SatMex sat, then, by you should never touch that dish elevation again, and yet you've been messing with it. If you are confident about the latitude, and have peaked on true south, then the only subsequent adjustment you should need to make is via rotating the whole mount on the pole.
Basically, I'd say that there are two possibilities. One, assuming that you DID adjust the latitude setting correctly, then it's possible that you were out of sync a bit, such as if the motor's zero wasn't at zero, and/or if you didn't run the motor to satmex via USALS before peaking on it. I would really suggest starting over, and first make sure your motor's zero is really on zero, then USALS to satmex, and peak dish elevation on that. THEN, when you go to sats east or west of that, peak by rotating the mount on the pole, however after each adjustment, attempt to also peak via running the motor via diseqC-1.2, to see if you can get improvements. I have seen lots of times when doing the mount on the pole azimuth adjustment, that the proper adjustment actually gives you worse signal until you peak again via the motor. My experiences were with BUDs, and with these little dishes with USALS, this shouldn't really happen, but it can happen if you are out of sync for one reason or another. Basically USALS doesn't always work if the motor isn't zero'd properly, and if you're out of sync, you can generally make things worse using the method you used.
However, the other possibility is that you didn't start off with the proper angle on the latitude adjustment. I'd particularly suspect this if you used charts that came with the motor. Or it could have been a combination of out of sync and wrong latitude.
But the bottom line is that if you have the latitude proper, and have peaked properly on your true south, then the ONLY adjustment remaining is the azimuth, however you may need to do azimuth in conjunction with running the motor back and forth a bit because you can't peak the azimuth properly unless you insure that you aren't out of sync.
Whoops - my bad. I rescanned Satmex 5 and now I do get channels on it. Got one labeled "Juarez" that looks like a truck inspection somewhere - Federales milling around, a truck with a boom on it that looks like a scanner setup of some kind - boring as can be but the picture's good.
I don't think very many folks, if anyone, understood my Bullhead vs Carp anaology very well.
But, to make it short and sweet, it was in reference to the method that a person grasps the understanding of this all.
Some people research every detail and disect every tidbit of information and are perfectionists, making sure that they know every detail and theory. i.e. a Bullhead likes to nibble and peck at the bait until it understands it very well and likes it enough to gulp it down.
Some people don't care if they know all the specifics, they just want to consume enough rough knowledge about the subject and only enough necessary to accomplish the job and move on to the next subject as fast as they can. i.e a Carp just grabs the bait as quickly as possible to fill it's belly and then races to the next source of food as quickly as it can.
I was kind oif thinking of the old parables that you might find in the old Kung Fu series from TV, the Master and the Grasshopper. I guess it was kind of a silly and obscure notion.
RADAR
But, to make it short and sweet, it was in reference to the method that a person grasps the understanding of this all.
Some people research every detail and disect every tidbit of information and are perfectionists, making sure that they know every detail and theory. i.e. a Bullhead likes to nibble and peck at the bait until it understands it very well and likes it enough to gulp it down.
Some people don't care if they know all the specifics, they just want to consume enough rough knowledge about the subject and only enough necessary to accomplish the job and move on to the next subject as fast as they can. i.e a Carp just grabs the bait as quickly as possible to fill it's belly and then races to the next source of food as quickly as it can.
I was kind oif thinking of the old parables that you might find in the old Kung Fu series from TV, the Master and the Grasshopper. I guess it was kind of a silly and obscure notion.
RADAR
Not silly, you just used the wrong fish.
I would have chosen the smallmouth bass instead of the bullhead, and the chain pickerel instead of the carp. The smallmouth generally very carefully picks up bait, testing it, and if you try to set the hook you'll miss every time. Then, he spits it out, waits a minute, THEN picks it up and runs. The chain pickerel acts like your carp, and comes at your bait so fast, you can see the wake on top of the water as he's approaching it, and hits hard and runs without thinking.But back to your analogy, I think most of us started out as carp or pickerel, because once you see that first signal the temptation to ignore instructions and just start fiddling with all the adjustments trying to get other sats, then you lose the first sat, so you start fiddling with another adjustment, until the alignment is completely messed up. I see this all the time on all the sat forums.
I don't think that it's necessary to understand everything, although it's fun trying, but it does help to not go off blindly in all directions. I used to have 2 beagles. One was an old dog, expert at following cottontail rabbits, the other was a young dog, who thought he knew everything. It was fun to watch them scare up a rabbit, and then try to follow it. The rabbit would run along in a straight line, then stop ,and make a BIG jump to the right, then head off in that direction (eventually he would make a BIG circle of probably a half mile).
Well that young dog would get the scent, and take off after the rabbit at high speed, get to where the rabbit jumped, and would keep on going, and would lose the trail, and not know what to do. The older dog would plod along, eventually catch up to where the rabbit jumped. He would lose the trail there, and immediatelly start circling, spiraling out from the last place he had the trail, and eventually pick it up again. Then the younger dog, would say OK, I got him now, and take off running again, and eventually lose it again. That old dog would follow a rabbit all day long, around and around. The young dog would eventually just give up. I guess that old dog was the bullhead/smallmouth, and the young dog was the carp/pickerel. I have a similar analogy related to snowshoe hairs to (which are completely different from cottontails in a funny way), but I'll spare you that for now.
Anyway, I think we all tend to start out trying to follow a logical approach, but then get impatient, and then go off in a random shotgun pattern approach, get lost, and eventually have to start over. It's not necessary to study and understand things, but it is helpful to understand that it isn't productive to just go off in all directions adjusting everything possible in site, so when you do get lost, it's better to go back and start over with the bullhead/smallmouth approach rather than continuing to carp up all the adjustments.
Not silly, you just used the wrong fish.
/.....But back to your analogy, I think most of us started out as carp or pickerel, because once you see that first signal the temptation to ignore instructions and just start fiddling with all the adjustments trying to get other sats, then you lose the first sat, so you start fiddling with another adjustment, until the alignment is completely messed up. I see this all the time on all the sat forums...../
/.....Anyway, I think we all tend to start out trying to follow a logical approach, but then get impatient, and then go off in a random shotgun pattern approach, get lost, and eventually have to start over. It's not necessary to study and understand things, but it is helpful to understand that it isn't productive to just go off in all directions adjusting everything possible in site, so when you do get lost, it's better to go back and start over with the bullhead/smallmouth approach rather than continuing to carp up all the adjustments.
B.J.
I think that describes it very well and right to the T!
There is a methodical approach to this and many miss it in their zealous approach to get everything perfect all at once and right at the start. i.e. Peaking the dish on ONE satellite doesn't make all the other satellites' reception better, it normally makes them worse. Following a set pattern and compromising a little here and there on each sat signal will get the most sats to come in extremely well, but very few will be at 100%. RADAR
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