I have a 36in Fortec dish. Now I know that the elevation on these fortec's can be off by 5-7 degrees. So all day I was playing with the elevation and a few times I would be able to get my true south locked on(74W ONN). The picture on my coolsat 5000 came on ok with 68quality. Then I would move the dish and blind scan another satellite and get nothing, I would move back to 74W and at times I would get a choppy picture. So I went back to the roof dropped the elevation a little then I would get nothing. It seems I need help in reading the elevation level here is a picture of the dish elevation and my motor latitude which I believe is at 40. Sorry about the quality I shot them with my cellphone. My setup is fortec 36in dish, coolsat 5000, moteck sg 2100
First of all, I have a 90CM Fortec and an SG2100, although my SG2100 seems to be a different flavor. A few years ago, when I bought them, I put together a small web page describing some measurements I made before putting them up.
FC90-sg2100.html
This may not help much, since I think the motors are different.
Relative to the Fortec dishes being off by 5-7 degrees, I have a couple opinions on this. My first impression from reading a bunch of posts is that the 90CM Fortec with the pole mount were much closer to being accurate than the dishes bought with the U-bolt version of mount. Similarly, people with some smaller Fortec dishes reported problems with the pole mount, and were closer with the U-bolt mount. My *GUESS* is that despite the fact that all the Fortec dishes had different offset angles, the dealers must have somehow interchanged the mounts that went with the various dishes. Part of what convinced me of this is that my dish came with the instruction sheet for another Fortec dish, not the 90CM that I bought, so I'm convinced that they just traded parts from different dishes. HOWEVER, my 90CM with the pole mount wasn't too far off.
HOWEVER, another thing about the Fortec dishes, is that they have a rather fragile LNBF arm, that is easily bent. Dishes with 3 support arms are much more reliable. One person on the Sadoun forum was having problems, and we determined that his lnbf arm had bent so that it was probably a good 8-10" out of position. At that time, I put together a little calculator to estimate where the LNBF should be.... not exactly, but close enough to tell if your arm was bent a lot.
BJ Offset Angle and LNBF Position Calculator
Anyway, my opinion is that the 90CM fortec with pole mount shouldn't be off 5-7 deg, and if it is, I'd suspect that the LNBF arm was bent. So I'd check that first.
The 2nd thing to determine is what the angle of the bend in the shaft of your SG2100 is. My SG2100 came with a 30 deg bend, but there have been posts suggesting that different varieties of SG2100 came with different offsets. This is only important to give you a starting point for your dish elevation, because you will generally be subtracting your declination from this angle to give your dish elevation. Like I subtracted about 6 deg from 30 to get a dish elevation around 24. Your motor probably came with instructions to subtract from 30 or 35 or 40, and this would be the angle of the bend in the shaft, however those motors sometimes came with different shafts with different bend angles, so I would try to verify that you're using the right number by measuring that bend. Again, it's just to get you close when starting. However, looking at where you have the dish elevation set, it looks consistent with a 40 deg bend in the shaft. If that's NOT your bend angle, then I'd start to suspect that your lnbf arm is bent.
The 3rd thing is that although it looks like your motor has a good indicator for it's elevation/latitude (Elevation scale=90 minus latitude scale), I would recommend getting an inclinometer or a digital angle meter, and verifying. My link above shows some good surfaces on the motor to measure off, although the problem is that once the dish is attached, it's hard to get an inclinometer in there. But you really want to get that motor elevation as accurate as possible, because it is set, and then never touched again (unless you made a mistake), so you want to get it as good as possible. And that latitude angle SHOULD be set at about 0.6 deg more than your actual latitude if you use the more accurate "modified" declination method. You said that you were setting your motor at 40 degrees, and yet your location is apparently Queens, which is closer to 40.7 degrees, and if you add 0.6 to that, you should be trying to hit an angle of closer to 41.3 deg, not 40 deg. Anyway, use an inclinometer, and try to get that motor at 41.3, then don't touch it again.
THEN, you go about the task of finding your true south sat using the dish elevation like LAK said. Don't touch the motor elevation. When you find that sat, and then try to motor to anoter sat to the west, if you can't find those sats, don't try fooling with the the dish elevation, try to find those sats by making small adjustments to the azimuth, ie rotating the whole mount a bit east and west on the pole.
Oh, and one other thing, I would recommend checking to see if your motor's zero is correct. Use the GOTO-Reference or GOTO-ZERO command of your receiver, to send the motor to zero, then go outside, and make sure that the little indicator on the motor shaft is pointing to zero. If it's not, you should manually move it to zero via the buttons, then do a hard reset.
