Thank you Tron and Mike Kohl. Well the PVC idea didn't last long at all, as predicted by Mike. It is shimmed now with wood, but on the next round of mods, I am going to beef it up with metal... like another diameter of pipe. I should mention the photos that Anole directed me to: whoever put that rig together did not take any chances with slippage. He used several pieces of PVC of various diameters, all inserted together concentrically... like a child's puzzle, but man, what a tight fit it seemed to be in the pictures. I think that is what Anole had in mind when he first mention PVC possibilites.
I'll tell you what guys, the SG2100 literature says that it can handle up to a 1.2m dish, but I think that they are stretching it a bit.
Tron, I waited until dark so that I could see the LED display that my son had described the night before. After laying down on the roof to see up at the LED, I cell phoned down and had my wife kick on the AC power switch on the back of the receiver. Sure enough, there was a series of flashes as my son had described. I was holding the bottom of the dish up just enough to get it off of the extreme West stop, just in case it mattered, and then I saw the sequence: three quick orange (maybe yellow) flashes, followed by one red, then one green flash. Then darkness. After the flashes, I used a paper clip to hit the reset button, and then attempted to move the dish eastward using the manual button. Nothing happened, but now I think I know why. According to Tron's reply, which I just read a minute ago, I should have brought the arm to the zero point before pressing the reset. I guess that really matters, since I got no response. Thinking that the motor was now dead, I pulled the dish to the zero point (approximately) and left it there.
Deciding to leave the motor out of the process, I proceeded to work on elevation, since the dish had been pretty much pointing straight down the street towards a big tree in the distance. After three tries at different angles I came down to the living room and was amazed to hear a series of tones coming out of the TV, a bright yellow bar marked "quality" jumping up and down from about 40 to 75%, and the banner where my receiver had been left on "Galaxy 10R" now proclaimed "Echostar 7 119.0 W". After fooling with this thing for weeks, I was in shock. How could the receiver suddenly change the name of the satellite I was trying to install, AND include the longitude? I didn't tell it that, and the screen had not previously displayed longitude. The excitement quickly spread to Mom and son #1, both of whom had recently left the fold of believers.
Ah, but then the let down. After letting it finish that satellite, I tried scanning two others that seemed to be only a couple of degrees away. When done, the receiver told us that we now had 442 channels distributed among three satellites. But when I called up the master channel list, all of the channels had dollar signs next to them. When I figured out how to filter the list, we were told that we had zero FTA channels. Not one. And I was so careful to have the FTA selection made before searching for the channels. What a bummer. Again, I found myself alone... even son #3, upon arriving home from school, left the living room disappointed.
Can this be a quirk of the Viewsat PVR7000? The manual is not real clear on capturing FTA channels only, although it describes filtering to FTA after the fact.
