My New Dish Farm

[armadillo_115]

Americas farthest north dish farm. Barrow, Alaska.

Cool! I used to shoot skip occasionally with a side-band operator at Point Barrow.... many years ago. My most Northern contact except for Russia over the Pole a few times.
CQ CQDX... armadillo115nc calling.

Sorry... off topic.

 

[ZetaMale]

You certainly wouldn't want to put up buildings or trees or any other obstruction anywhere in front of them.

 

[907TECH]

You certainly wouldn't want to put up buildings or trees or any other obstruction anywhere in front of them.

There are no trees in Barrow...

 

[Corrado]

iBoston
I don't recall ever seeing a SatMaximum satellite dish, where did you get it?

 

[iBoston]

So, it always seems every winter i take a few hits over the winter, and If its not too serious, i wait until spring to get it cleared up. Well, Spring isn't here yet, as we are still covered in two feet of snow. I have noticed for a month that i couldn't get any horizontal signals on one of my Cband dishes. Its a 35 degree no wind day, and i had troubleshooted it to the point i knew the issue was probably a cable issue outside. I trudged through the snow and immediately saw the problem. One of the cables had been pulled down by the snow load and pulled it out of the coax coupler connector. I always leave a nice overage, and i cut the cable, and put a new connector on it, and screwed it on. I have my horizontal back! - I have two other dishes i need to do a little tweaking on.

My KU moveable dish that i hooked up at the last minute before snow came needs some adjusting, and another dish i setup about the same time needs a little fine tuning. All and all, everything held up well this winter. If this social distancing keeps going, ill have a lot of time outside to fix things up.

 

[iBoston]

iBoston
I don't recall ever seeing a SatMaximum satellite dish, where did you get it?

I got it off ebay. I am happy with the dishes. I bought two of them, and got a discount for that.

 

[iBoston]

Okay, well, spring finally arrived, and although the snow isn't completely gone, its a nice 45 degrees and sunny, so thats good enough. I broke the weld, and re-aligned the USALS KU dish with a digital angle meter, instead of the hand level i was using before. Much much better performance. I locked signals between 34.5w and 123w. I didn't try 30w or 125w because i have fixed dishes at those locations.

Trying to lock stuff between 30w and 89w. So far, I was able to lock and pull some ITC stuff on 34.5w , and 45w.

 

[iBoston]

Today it's looking quite gloomy outside, so ill wait until a sunny day, but now that i have the USALS all aligned up, I am going to put on a Circular LNBF as a side lobe so i can get the circular birds on USALS.

 

[cyberham]

I had a circular LNB mounted years ago. I could easily do this again. Having a circular offset works better than a linear one. Is it worth doing this nowadays?

Sent from my SM-G950W using the SatelliteGuys app!

 

[iBoston]

I had a circular LNB mounted years ago. I could easily do this again. Having a circular offset works better than a linear one. Is it worth doing this nowadays?

Sent from my SM-G950W using the SatelliteGuys app!

Circular LNBF as a side lobe works great, because those circular feeds are high output.

Whether or not it's worth it is very subjective. I like being able to have the ability to check as much as possible. For example, i have fixed dish for 91w which i have an invacom which gives me both linear and circular. I also have a fixed dish on 110w with a Invacom which allows me to lock 110w and 111w being i have linear and circular.

Being i have a Universal LNBF on my USALS KU, once i put a Circular Side Lobe on it, ill be able to have access to everything in the arc that's available to get.

Also, with the DSR STB i have, I have more content that most cannot touch. Example there are 3 tv channels and some radio channels on the 110/111 that are turbo 8psk and can only be viewed with a compatible receiver.

There are from time to time on 107w KU, low band transponders that have had FTA channels.

 

[cyberham]

You've motivated me since I'm running out of tasks I can do with current hardware anyway. Need sunny weather to do. I keep checking 58W and 78W linear Ku scrambled tps for ITC. But nothing found except barker channels.

Sent from my SM-G950W using the SatelliteGuys app!

 

[iBoston]

You can get a DSR-6000 for around 100 bucks and it gives you access to ZK/FP channels in Dicicipher and access to ZK turbo 8psk channels. I think a serious must for anyone that wants to have access to as much as possible, and alots more tinkering time...

 

[cyberham]

I have a working old Bell satellite receiver/PVR from 2006 with my former subscriber card (appears to be Motorola). Would that do anything that's legal?

Sent from my SM-G950W using the SatelliteGuys app!

 

[iBoston]

I have a working old Bell satellite receiver/PVR from 2006 with my former subscriber card (appears to be Motorola). Would that do anything that's legal?

Sent from my SM-G950W using the SatelliteGuys app!

It might. I don't have experience with those receivers, but I would check to make sure it is turbo 8psk capable....

 

[iBoston]

Wow, that was somewhat a pain in the butt. Getting the sidelobe lnbf attached and fine tuned was easy, the trick was to think of a 4 degree separation where I could then lock a circular TP. I ended up moving the KU USALS to 95w, verified and locked the Chinese channels, and then did a side lobe to hit 91w Nimiq 6 that has a circular TP that a normal STB can lock. I fine tuned it to the FREE PREVIEW channel on 91w. I then knew i had a good 4 degree separation.

I can now lock all the circular Birds via USALS. My first bird of choice was 61.5w (Dish Network) . Now that i had the 4 degree separation, i setup 61.5w with a USALS position of 65.5 ... There was actually 1 lockable Horizontal Transponder with my normal STB. I then forced the voltage to then scan a false Vertical TP. With one Horizontal/Vertical on the Master STB, one lockable and one fake, i had the master setup for one Horizontal and one Vertical. With that, i could then move on to the slave DSR-6000 receiver which can lock 8psk Turbo channels and am currently in the process of locking and scanning in the channels of all the 8turboPsk channels. If there are any ITC channels ill find em. Already knew about and verified found 1.

 

[comfortably_numb]

Wow, that was somewhat a pain in the butt. Getting the sidelobe lnbf attached and fine tuned was easy, the trick was to think of a 4 degree separation where I could then lock a circular TP. I ended up moving the KU USALS to 95w, verified and locked the Chinese channels, and then did a side lobe to hit 91w that has a circular TP that a normal STB can lock. I fine tuned it to the FREE PREVIEW channel on 91w. I then knew i had a good 4 degree separation.

I can now lock all the circular Birds via USALS. My first bird of choice was 61.5w (Dish Network) . Now that i had the 4 degree separation, i setup 61.5w with a USALS position of 65.5 ... There was actually 1 lockable Horizontal Transponder with my normal STB. I then forced the voltage to then scan a false Vertical TP. With one Horizontal/Vertical on the Master STB, one lockable and one fake, i had the master setup for one Horizontal and one Vertical. With that, i could then move on to the slave DSR-6000 receiver which can lock 8psk Turbo channels and am currently in the process of locking and scanning in the channels of all the 8turboPsk channels. If there are any ITC channels ill find em. Already knew and found 1.

So there are circular transponders on 91? I'm confused.

 

[iBoston]

So there are circular transponders on 91? I'm confused.

I edited the post to kinda answer that question. Nimiq 6 is a circular bird for BELL Canada subscribers.. Luckily I am in the foot print of it.

 

[iBoston]

Kinda nice. Some of the spot beams audio are ITC. I am currently listening to 10pm news out of Detroit.

 

[iBoston]

I will take some pictures and post them. But, that USALS is now finished. It's fine tuned and now that i have a Universal LNBF and a side lobe Circular LNBF, I can now fetch KU Low band/hi band/H/V/L/R . I know I'm a freak, but i enjoy locking those signals that are a bit obscure. I was tickled pink over Christmas when i was able to get a 24/7 ITC audio/video channel of Santa putting logs in the fireplace.. It was a low band KU turbo 8psk.

Gosh, i LOVE this hobby.

 

[cyberham]

Following your lead, today I installed an offset circular LNB on my motorized dish. I have now scanned in 537 TV and 173 radio channels from 31 transponders on 91W Nimiq 6. Likely they are all scrambled but I will go through them now to check. I used 95W to get the dish pointed then used the 4 degree offset to position the circular LNB as you described. Now I will go looking for circular transponders.