No, not what I meant.
Exactly. Any ground not covered by shadow when the sun lines up with the satellite is a place where you can plant a dish to receive the satellite.
Today wasn't a good day to try this since there were clouds obscuring the sun partially. On a clear day, I will check the yard near the end of the day when the sun is at about 13 degrees elevation to see what I can discover. 13 degrees elevation occurs around 5:30 pm local time. At that time, the sun's azimuth will be about 6 degrees to the west of Intelsat 18.
Skew here is +35.3 degrees. With that amount of skew, if it were in the wrong direction, I wouldn't receive any signal. For an inverted dish, I learned last time I inverted that you turn the LNB in the same direction as if the dish is not inverted. The scale on my LNB bracket only goes to 20 degrees, so I do have to guess a little about where 35.3 degrees would be. I could try adjusting the skew a little next time I'm at the dish to see if this fixes the issue.
I looked at high resolution old photos. I think you're right! This would explain my problem and the disagreement with satstar and Lyngsat. I will correct tomorrow! My most recent memory about an inverted dish was when aiming my fixed dish at 77W. Of course its skew is in the opposite direction of 180E.
I think now that Lyngsat is correct. We cannot receive the horizontal beam since it's focused on the South Pacific. We can only receive the vertical beam here in North America. I will correct my LNB skew today which will correct my scanned results to vertical only.
Maybe, it's definitely below my horizon so I have no way of verifying anything. I just don't remember ever seeing the same frequency with both H and V polarities on the same satellite before.
Keith Brannen gets the Troubleshooter's Award with full bragging rights associated. The LNB skew was corrected and both tps scan in on the correct vertical polarity.
there is one that I can think of... Hispasat 30W5 has stuff on the Americas beam on 12052 H 27500 and on 12052 V 27500. Very confusing at first.
This situation is quite common on international C-band satellites such as 58 West, but it lost quite a few TPs during the month of August. It previously had several frequencies that were the same on both H and C polarity, for comparison purposes. Once you have relatively good signals from one frequency on H and another on V, and have achieved best quality or C/N reading in dB, there is an old trick that makes it even more precise. There is a spot on each polarity (should be 90 degrees out from the other) where nulling out a frequency from the opposite side creates maximum separation. This results in an even greater signal on each polarity, which is the best way to get maximum signal when encountering a frequency that is using both Horizontal and Vertical for two separate transponders. If you have a spectrum analyzer and look at the display, you will see a very sharp drop of the unwanted signal from opposite side when rotated to this precise spot. Otherwise, those using LNBFs that are not perfectly aligned in skew rotation will experience serious competition between frequencies used on both H and V. You will never get it right until you find that spot, and I was taught many years ago to create such a null to maximize the desired channels on each side. Good luck!
very good point, excellent advice! Thanks for sharing
