GeoSat Dual C-Band LNB

[stogie5150]

I finally got around to installing it today on my 7.5 foot Perfect 10 dish....My notes are as follows.

If you have a tripod arrangement, you'll be fine. If you have a quad leg, like I do, you'll be short a screw to attach the scalar ring to the fourth leg. And NO bolt I had would fit. I had to use a smaller bolt and just tighten it real well. Other than that, no install issues.
Adjusting it, however, was not so easy. Not a fault of the LNB, however, I just couldn't hold the LNB and watch the TV screen to see the SQ at the same time.

Skew...man I scratched my head almost until it bled...I couldn't get both polarities to skew right. Turns out ( thanks to an earlier post by Iceberg I found here) the LNB needs to be at the 9:00 position to start and THEN you set the skew. NOT like a KU LNB, this one does NOT install 0 Degrees up. Once I did that, everything fell into place.

Signal quality was better than my Chaparral feedhorn/Eagle Aspen 25 degree LNB combo, so no complaints about that. I probably gained 5-8 points on the Coolsat 5000 on the typical TP. Very satisified.

I ran the two outputs into my attic, installed a 3X4 multiswitch, and bam, C-band on every receiver in my house!

Thanks to Our Gold Sponsor Satellite AV for a great product at a great price! :up:up:up

Pics are below....first one is what I started with, then after that as I installed it.

 

[Anole]

nice pix

Looks very clean and simple
Gives us Ku-banders hope that some day we might conquer C-band, too!


I think Iceberg had one of those two-output GeoSat LNBs a while back...
I'll let him fill in the story of what happened to it.
But while he was using it, I think it performed quite well.
Good to get extra confirmation.
That device was on my short list, just as soon as a suitable dish appeared in my back yard.

 

[Mr Tony]

yep have one of those. Worked great until recently

I had it on my 6 foot dish which is bolted on top of a 30" table (to clear the roof) and has 140 pounds of sand on the back of the dish. A few weeks ago we had 70+ mph winds and a really bad storm and the wind tipped the dish over (still bolted to the table) and in the process one of the outputs doesn't work well. I havent had time to check it out but I know the nets went from 65 down to 15 and WHT went from 90+ to 40...swapped out my old LNB (with the 3 wires missing for skew) and manually skewed it and get the nets back to 65+, WHT at 90+ and even get KCWY TV NBC

 

[lumpkin666]

I installed one of these awhile back and the signal quality jumped tremendously over the BSC621 that I had been using. I just slapped it on and tinkered with it for a few minutes to get a decent signal, and its been performing great every since.

Odd though, I set mine so that the 0 skew position was straight up/down. This put the lnb/connectors at approx 3:00 position. I wonder if I have it exactly opposite of where it should be skewed? If so, the signal quality should be amazing if I were to change it!

 

[Mr Tony]

Here is an old picture with the LNB set up for G4 which is 6 degrees off my true south (IA6) (2nd LNB to right is set for AMC1)

Its kinda hard to see but seeing the 30 at the top and the dash below it shows the lNB set at 9:00 skew

 

[colbec]

I think the Digiwave DGC-223 is a rebrand of the single output version of this lnb. If I am wrong then I stand to be corrected.

I had one of these which worked well until until after the close lightning strike back in the summer. With nothing to lose I took the box apart to find out why it stopped. I found that the voltage had literally blown two holes in the circuit board about a quarter inch across.

Admittedly, nothing is going to save any circuit board from such high voltages, but it may point to a weakness in the lnb when compared to alternatives. It seem to me that the board is as thin as a wafer and may be vulnerable to casual voltages and would not be tolerated in a commercial environment or a region where lightning strikes are frequent.

Stogie, I ran into the same issues with the bolts and scalar ring. I think they used metric fine thread or something.

 

[Mr Tony]

10mm wrench puts those bolts on (the ones that comw with the scaler rings)

 

[Anole]

I can't help but chuckle.
Had discussions with Canadians in the past, on the trouble finding metric hardware .
....in a country that I thought was metric-only.

Here in the USA, we straddle the fence, and can't make up our mind just what we are!
I think we hold onto English measurements more so than the darned English themselves!
And yet I could walk to a local place and get you a 10mm bolt 'n nut!
(...and if there's a 10mm fine, I'll wager I could get that, too!)

How long is it, and does it need a nut? I'll go see what the local stores have available.

Better yet, maybe we can get SatelliteAV to include one extra piece of hardware in the package.
That would solve everybodys problem.

 

[colbec]

It's not a matter of finding the right wrench or a nut to go with a bolt (even when you do live a half hour drive from the closest hardware store that likely won't have what you are looking for or an hour from one that will), more the nuisance factor of interchangeability of lnbs and scalar rings. Ideally you would have a standard size of scalar ring so you don't have to remove the scalar ring when you swap an lnb. Most of the time there is no problem but I have run into a couple of occasions recently where an lnb would not fit the scalar ring and had to remove and replace and readjust the whole shebang.

 

[gabshere]

i like the ideal of dual feeds from one lnbf this will be considered in my future plans + the bandstacking ones.

Glad you got it all setup and working just in time for football feeds and LSU is playing

now this goes back to where you sold the extra analog equipment ....... with the proper switch you could have viewed analog in each room that had equipment........... now that you have the c-band fed to several rooms but only one analog receiver........ not that you would watch that much analog.......

but i do like the options of several receivers on one dish great job