dfergie said:
Usually Red, White and Black go to your servo moter for the H/V on the feedhorn... they are usually in their own jacket. (ribbon cable) the Moter(dishmover) leads will be Red and White and the wires for the reed (or other ) sensor will be Brown,Green, Orange with a bare wire for the Shield if memory serves me right...
Right, the servo motor wires are Red, White and Black - on the back of his receiver those would be the "Polarizer" terminals (the ones that look like speaker wire connectors). The Red wire goes to the top right terminal (a red one, naturally) and the Black wire goes just beneath it, to the bottom right terminal. Then the white wire would go to the other red terminal, the one on the left this time, since it's the "skew" wire. The bottom right black terminal would not be used.
The motor wire connections would be underneath the plastic block or cover just above the Polarizer terminals. These are the ones marked M1 and M2. I assume the plastic cover can be unscrewed and then you attach the motor wires to the screws underneath. In the bundle of wires, there should be two wires that are not coax, but ARE obviously of heavier gauge than the other single wires. Those go to the M1 and M2 terminals. The motor is in the base of the positioner arm that sticks out behind the dish.
The bad part about this is that if you hook the wires up backwards, the dish will move west when the receiver says it's going east, and vise versa. Should that happen , reverse the two wires on M1 and M2. Unfortunately, you usually can't tell if you have it right until you try it.
There should be two other wires, perhaps smaller than all the rest - these go to the reed sensor switch (assuming that the positioner arm isn't older than Methuselah) and that would normally be the PULSE and GND screws on the terminal strip at the top. Again assuming that the arm is of somewhat recent vintage, the +5 screw is NOT used.
The motor wires and the reed sensor wires will often be in the same cable, but the two motor wires will be much larger than the reed sensor wires.
If they used a commercial satellite cable, there may also be a ground wire, usually it will be bare or in some way by itself. That would hook to the black binding post to the right of the Polarizer terminals, the one with the ground wire symbol underneath. If you don't see one don't worry about it; more than likely the receiver will work fine without it (although with a pole THAT high, I'd hope they took extra pains to keep all the grounds intact!).
So to recap, the three wires from the Polarizer (which is attached to the feedhorn) go to the bottom set of terminals, and should be in their own cable. The four wires from the positioner arm - the two heavy ones from the motor, and the two lighter ones from the reed sensor switch - should be in one or two other cables. The polarity of the wires coming from the reed sensor switch isn't important, but the polarity of the wires feeding the motor is - if you get them backwards the dish will move in the wrong direction, and you'll have to reverse them.
Having said all that, I've seen setups that don't go by these rules at all. For example, on my C-band dish, someone came up with a six wire stranded cable where all the wires were the same size (fairly heavy) to go to the positioner arm, so all I can do is watch the color codes at both ends (and lament that two perfectly good wires are unused). But that is a lot easier when the positioner arm is four feet off the ground! So I'm hoping that in your case, the standard ways of doing things are what you find.
. There are 2 different coax runs from the dish, but I don't know if it's because one is Ku or because the old run got damaged and is burried so they didn't bother digging it up. Unfortunately with the height I can't just open the thing up and see what the feedhorn/lnb situation is. I also found a number on top of the receiver for the installer, so I'm going to give them a call as well to see if they have any info on the setup. I also guess from my research that I need some sort of card to plug in to subscribe to any of the packages. I admit my primary interest right now is the HD feeds which seem to all be C-Band, but I would like to get Ku working as well.
