How does Satwork work with Dish LNBF?

[carload]

I tried and failed to get the FTA Canadian radio channels from Nimiq 1. Here's what I did:

I bought a used Dish single LNBF from eBay and put it aside.

I pointed my Ku-band dish at Galaxy 11 to ensure that I found the right spot in the sky. And for the thrill of watching Primedia.

I swapped in the Dish LNBF and set the parameters on my Satwork to:
LNBF Normal (not Universal)
LO 11250
Freq 12224
SR 20000
I couldn't find a way to set L/R polarity, so I tried Vertical and Horizontal.

Not a peep from the Satwork. I shifted the LNBF around and switched between V/H with no luck.

Am I doing something wrong?

 

[Mr Tony]

looks like your doing it right

11250 for LO
R=V
L=H

try 12282 V 20000. I know Power 97 is on there and comes in

 

[PSB]

Try a blind scan? If you KNOW you are on the satellite and just cant get the radio channels try this.....

Press TV/Radio

Menu

Channel Manager.........where you will see the list radio channels.

Confirm you are still on 91w as if there are no radio channels listed there it will move the dish (If motorized) to a satellite with radio channels!

This is for the Satwork 3688

 

[carload]

Ran the blind scan with odd results.

Good News: Tp 21 (12516 V) yields its three radio stations.

Bad News: Nothing else works right.

The Satwork detects Tp 11 (12370 V) but can't find the three stations Global says are there. It also sees some of the clusters of scrambled TV channels.

When I Manual scan for the other Tp's that where radio stations are reported, 1 (12224 V), 5 (12282 V), 10 (12355 H), 15 (12428 V), 18 (12472 H), 19 (12486 V), and 22 (12530 H), the Satwork gives me 0% quality.

Now why do you suppose I could pick up one supposedly weak transponder and miss all these others?

Edit: Reviewing LyngSat's charts, it looks like I can only get Nimiq 3 but not Nimiq 1. Does that make sense?

 

[Mr Tony]

Nimiq 1 was the original satellite and is CONUS (for us...it covers Canada)
Nimiq 3 is the problem child if you're in the southern US and the west coast

Where ya located Carload?

The TP's on N3 are 3 7 9 11 17 21 23 25

 

[carload]

I'm in Denver. Yeah, that's the weird part -- I'm only picking up the "problem child" and not getting the original.

 

[Mr Tony]

According to a map that was generated at www.canadian-tv.com/forums, someone in Arvada, CO got between 85-100 on those TP's with a 18" dish (the trouble ones)

Did you try to move your dish a little bit? I dont know what else to think

 

[carload]

Did you try to move your dish a little bit? I dont know what else to think

Sure enough, just a smooch more elevation, and everthing came blasting in loud and clear. Now I just have the daunting task of convincing the wife that adding the cool Canadian radio stations is worth mounting a small dish somewhere.

 

[Mr Tony]

All you need is a 18" dish aimed at 91

So how do you like the stations?

 

[carload]

The ExpressVu barker channel, repeatedly talking about how to use your BEV equipment and where to find all the channels you want, had superb picture quality. It got dull pretty quick, but it made me consider subscribing.

As I flipped from blank channel to blank channel, occasionally I'd find one that I could hear. Not that it's worth listening to, but I'd never heard that phenomenon mentioned before.

The audio channels were all where they were supposed to be. I didn't have a lot of time to enjoy them, but I flipped through them all. Listening to some French programming, it occurred to me that there isn't much French language programming available elsewhere FTA.

Then it was time to end the experiment. I replaced the Dish LNBF with the standard Ku band and pointed the dish back to AMC4 for now.

 

[Mr Tony]

There are some Descriptive Video channels on EVu. The picture is blacked out but there is sound

 

[TuxCoder]

The ExpressVu barker channel, repeatedly talking about how to use your BEV equipment and where to find all the channels you want, had superb picture quality. It got dull pretty quick, but it made me consider subscribing.

You fell for the age-old DBS marketing ploy to sucker in all the FTA hobbyists: simply leave the compression set way low or completely off for your in-the-clear channels, no matter how lame they are, and since the PQ is excellent on those, the FTAers assume it's like that for all channels, and thus want to give you money. It could work...

As I flipped from blank channel to blank channel, occasionally I'd find one that I could hear. Not that it's worth listening to, but I'd never heard that phenomenon mentioned before.

I've come across those before, even on FSS satellites. Some of the encryption technologies don't seem to include the audio. This seems especially true of AC3 audio.

 

[Mr Tony]

Considering they cram 9 channels and 6 audio on this TP, the quality is pretty decent. I have (had) ExpressVu and some of the compression is terrible...but the receivers are made by Dish so what did you expect