Primestar dish for FTA?

[slimpickins]

I found an unused primestar dish with an lnb that has a vertical and horizontal hookup. Was wondering if anyone has been able to use this dish as a FTA setup. Thanks for any and all help.

 

[Wholeshoe]

Yes

It should work fine for FTA. You will need some sort of multi-switch for a DVB receiver to switch between H and V. Maybe others can help you with where to buy one. I would look into programming to see what satellite you might want to point it at. G10r has a lot of locals from around the country and IA5 has a great selection of foregin content depending on what you want to watch.

Look at some of the other threads on this forum to see whats up there and have fun with it.

Wholeshoe

 

[PSB]

Here are a few threads about using the Primestar dish for FTA, should work great...

http://www.satelliteguys.us/showthread.php?t=33723&highlight=Primestar+dish

http://www.satelliteguys.us/showthread.php?t=30045&highlight=Primestar+dish

 

[MikeI]

Slimpickens....interesting name....what's up?

 

[anik]

I found an unused primestar dish with an lnb that has a vertical and horizontal hookup. Was wondering if anyone has been able to use this dish as a FTA setup. Thanks for any and all help.

Yes, you can for example park in on Galaxy 10 (use the vertical output if you only use one, or you can run both outputs into a DiSEqC switch and let the receiver select horizontal or vertical, or you could even use a manual A-B switch to select the appropriate input) and pick up a bunch of stuff. The hard part will be pointing it precisely at the satellite, which will be a lot easier if you have a sat finder.

One thing you need to be aware of is that in addition to adjusting the position (relative to due south) and the elevation, there is also a skew adjustment on the LNB itself that will need to be tweaked to get a good quality signal. The low signal strength I was getting frustrated me no end until I noticed the manual skew adjustment (which involves loosening the four small screws slightly and rotating the feedhorn until you get the best quality indication, then retightening the screws).