I just today got out to look at the dish. Turns out there was a second set of holes on the dish itself that I managed to miss when I was looking at it in the dark (shock, surprise). I moved it and that got the dish down low enough that I can now at least set the motor elevation correctly. I fought a little bit with it to get the DVB-S2 PBS feeds in and it tracks over to the RTV mux on 83W, but does not seem to get down to 72W or lower. It needs more work, certainly, but I'm pretty happy with it right at the moment.
- Trip
Hey Trip,
Sounds like you are starting to get a hand on your installation. You are headed in the right direction anyway. Glad to hear that your 6K is still working and I hope it continues to live, it is a beauty for a satellite signal meter! For a backyard dish farmer, the early model Coolsats (4K, 5K and 6K) are excellent satellite finding meters because they are so doggone easy to set up and their tuners are so quick to respond to a detected signal.
Try the following procedure to align your dish and motor now...
Start at your reference satellite (true south). Using USALS, with your most precise coordinates entered, drive the dish west to a satellite that you can still detect signal from and tweak the azimuth of the motor by turning the motor mount on the mast. Then, drive the dish east to the furthest satellite that you can still detect signal from and tweak the dish elevation. Then go back west to the furthest detectable satellite and tweak the azimuth, then back east to the furthest detectable satellite and tweak the dish elevation. Keep repeating this back and forth adjustment until you have covered the entire horizon.
Just ensure that you adjust one parameter ONLY on each side of the horizon. i.e. adjust the motor azimuth on the west and dish elevation on the east. You may reverse that, but stick with whatever you choose all the way through until done. This works really well for calibrating the dish alignment to match the arc.
Many people dial in on one satellite and pick out the TP that they happen to detect and adjust everything to peak the signal for maximum quality right there. Then they cannot understand why another satellite off to the left or right isn't coming in. That procedure is excellent for a single, fixed point dish, but not for a motorized system.
With a motorized system, you don't want to adjust the dish and motor angles to peak the signal from just one TP and one satellite, you want to adjust it to track the arc and PEAK IT to the arc. Some satellites or individual TPs may appear weak while doing this. Don't be swayed to adjust and peak for them! Get the whole arc peaked first. You have to ignore your gut instinct to get one satellite, one transponder or one channel peaked to perfection. You are calibrating your motor and dish to the entire arc, not just one satellite. Keep that in mind and you will find that everything falls into place naturally. It simply requires a lot of patience and some time. Don't get frustrated even if you make a mistake.
The most tedious and frustrating part is switching satellites and TPs on the IRD or meter. That is what takes up most of the time. I found that (especially with the Coolsats) it is very handy to create an alignment channel list. I create a list of satellites with only ONE TP on each that is known good (strong signal and broadcasted continuously - no feeds). This way, I can simply switch from sat to sat and it has to go to the same TP each time because there is nothing else to choose from. This speeds up the calibration process a great deal. You don't really have to have a channel scanned in, just the entry of a known active transponder is all that is required.
RADAR
