New Guy

[Fizbi]

I suspect I was a little lax in how I mounted the dish last night and just got lucky with that 1 satellite, I'll spend some time today double checking things.

AFM,

Sounds like my first experience with FTA.
I was stuck on one satellite for months before I got the courage to try and get another one. Keep at it, you are doing quite well. I'm enjoying your posts.

I have two CS5000s and both are tied into one motorized dish.

Best of luck to you.

 

[zamar23]

AFineMan

Your motor might have 2 scales, each on opposite side of its bracket: Latitude and Elevation. Set your location Latitude on its Latitude scale and don't touch for now. I'm surprised, your new dish doesn't have a scale to set its Declination (its a different value compare to Elevation) in a Motorized setup. Look at pictures in above mentioned Tutorial for details. Contact your dealer about the absent scale, as it may be quite hard for a newbie to set it up without a scale using a protractor and $10 meter. Do you know its offset angle as per the dish spec? What exact make & model of dish did you receive?

 

[AFineMan]

zamar23

I got this package Dish Motor Package: 90cm Dish FTA Ku band Motor DSS/DBS Circular and FSS Linear Satellite Package Motorized Dish Antenna Ku FTA Sat Dish

And I too was surprised the dish bracket does not have the graduates on it.

Well the bottle of wine has been cracked so I'm done for the day but this is where I am.

Rebuilt the mount, as I was using my compass I thought it was faulty but I believe there was another reason. I fly RC model planes, I am all electric, I have some very powerful motors (in my desk on the other side of the wall the dish is mounted on), some of these motors I use to fly a 12 pound plane for acrobatics (it is rated at 3000 watts) they have rare earth magnets in them and "May" (don't know for sure) be causing an issue.

Spent the day trying to duplicate the success of last night, to no avail, I was sure I was close, but nothing. I switched to the circular LNB (see I'm getting the lingo down:up) and scanned the sky, I got Dish 110 (98%) and all the way down to NiMig 82@94%.

What I'm a little puzzled about is NiMig 91, (that I got a 95% reading for and according to Lyngsat) is on top of Galaxy 17 (same A and E value) yet these circuler sats came in strong.

So (and correct me if I am wrong) the ark between 82 and 110 is with in the path of a lot of satelites I should be able to track, from what I have read says I should be able to get everything between those 2. the ONLY thing I have read that could explane it is if the skew was off, as I type I realize the only thing I didn't do was to que up NiMig 91 switch to the linear LNB and go out and play with skew, tomorrow project.

Let me offically ask, am I doing something wrong? are my assumptions incorrect? is there a "Little Balck Majic dust" needed when expirementing with this hobby?.

Well that was my day, time for another glass

AFM

 

[turbosat]

Circular sats are easy, they put out about 10 times the power of linear satellites. Tune in 91 again with the C-side, and then switch to the L-port, run blind scan. (adjust skew to whatever the dishpointer site says for 91 for your location, then scan) You should get 10-12 channels, some scrambled that say things like LETN, TXCN, etc, prob get audio on them but no picture.
Prob find a few news feeds too, tweak your dish and then you'll be getting the idea of how it all works.

edit: just remembered you are using a motor, hope you have USALS setup in your rec for those sats. You have to enter your lat/long info into the receiver's motor setup screen. PM me your phone# tomorrow and I"ll try to call and help you work on it, if you like.

 

[zamar23]

AFineMan

Look at above post - could you imagine how good and friendly some FTA fans really are! May be this is the guy who dumped you the dish without a scale - just kidding.

You're on the right pass, but mixing up a lot of things in a bottle. May be its a good idea to let Turbosat call you. Also find out your Longitude and select in Lyngsat 3 circular sats: in the middle and opposite sites of your Sat Arc to set your dish roughly on the Arc. Compass might not be too accurate at pointing to true south, even if you account for magnetic declination, especially given your "earth magnet" stock. But Sun shadow won't let you down, if you catch it at "solar noon" time. You must be very accurate at pointing to true south, if you want USALS to help you out with catching sats. Don't bother with Skew when aiming a motorized dish, its automatic - just put LNB vertically when facing due south.

 

[AFineMan]

Morning All

turbosat

I am honored by the offer (and quick acceptance by all here), yet when starting something new I derive the most pleasure in the journey not the final location.

Like when I picked up my first computer in 1982 and this journey is still being fulled today by Linux, there are many more (short lived) hobbies that I became proficient in and then lost interest (heck I'm on my 3rd wife), it is more about the learning than the doing (for me anyways). 30 years ago 1 of the things 1 of my mentors taught me is "you learn nothing from success, it is only when you fail the learning begins"

So anyways, I found 89 through 101 yesterday, actually they were always there, this was why I missed them. This Coolsat receiver has a signal and quality bar graph indicator that not only does it graph it switches between red (no good) to green and when I scanned the sky it stayed red on the linear LNB yet finding 91 through 110 on the circular. using the sat finding meter I adjusted for the highest pitch and did a blind scan and voila, there they were.

I'm not out of the woods yet, I've made a big mistake in dish placement, and goofed on my site survey. Earlier I spoke about using a compass, protractor with plumb line and a straw to survey my yard, well even tho it was accurate I missed something (nube mistake), the straw is 1/4 inch diameter where the dish is 36 inches in diameter so I need to trim some trees to get full signal.

My set up is off a hair in one (if not more) of it's axis my ark is not perfect requiring a slight elevation adjustment, I'll assume here and guess my true south is off a hair (well that's what my math is telling me).

A few thing I've discovered yesterday and have concluded upon (and PLEASE correct me if I am wrong) these LNBs are nothing more than VOCs (Voltage Controlled Oscillators) meaning the receivers must be very precise power supply.

An easier way to find true south (I believe) would be to adjust for your truest south sat for my location it is 71.8 = 181.02 them move to 101.01 = 220.60, having covered 30 degrees of my ark measure the amount of elevation change needed, then calculate the # of degrees rotation needed, or is there already an online applet out here that will do the math for you?

Or the non math way, (for my location) adjust for 71.8 drive to 101.01 and if the elevation has to go up that means I have to rotate a little to the west, if it goes down then a little to the east, I would guess 3 cycles of this should get you there (I'll test this theory today, this all came to me last night in the hot tube with a glass of wine and a cigar).

I'd better stop here, this is becoming a book

Later All

AFM

 

[zamar23]

When using a motor, you don't have to correct dish elevation manually for each sat. For your 71W Longitude - what 3 sats did you choose to set your dish on the Arc and why? Did you look at their area coverage map at Lyngsat Maps and SatcoDX?

Since you have Invacom, connect its C port for circular, or L for Linear sats, while the receiver is Off. Did you connect any switch so far? Coolsat controls the motor and LNB pretty well, but you need to select a correct LNB LO value (10750 for L, 11250 for C), and, once at signal pick for a select sat, scroll down its Transponders list slowly to find the one with a strong signal to see Q bar moving. You may need to add a strong TP from the list posted on this website for a particular sat , as Lyngsat info may be obsolete. Keep in mind, your assumption about what sat gives you a meter pick may be wrong, so try several close sats, but don't forget to select LNB LO and type each time you try, and go down the TP list for each.

 

[turbosat]

You're doing ok then, it does take time until you get really used to setting up these things. The best way I saw came with instructions my motor contained. Put motor on pole, adjust to due south as close as you can, adjust elevation to your site latitude. Then mount dish to motor, adjust declination. Set up your true south satellite in the reciever, use USALS to move dish to that satellite, try blind scan. If no luck, manually add a channel on that satellite, then loosen motor bracket slightly to allow east/west movement-try to find that channel. May require slight tweaking of east/west and elevation, but I found the USALS prog is pretty accurate. Once you get the elevation/declination worked out , you can tweak the tracking, by adjusting east/west again. Takes practice.

 

[zamar23]

This sequence may vary slightly. A few things to note:
- USALS positioning accuracy at times depends on Motor type - there're multiple reports on this;
- to get USALS effective, one needs to exactly point Motor 0 towards due south;
- hard to grasp, but his new dish from a good supplier doesn't have an elevation scale. Slow times force people to cut corners - it sounds like pennies, but depending on sales volume might not be...