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its the same principle as if i moved an ota antenna and pointed it right at the station, and the picture is bad, its the receiving elements of the antenna
people call that a dish antenna, witch is improper, the dish part is a satellite reflector, the dish itself does not act as an antenna, it just reflects the signal to the lnb, the metal wire inside the lnb, is the antenna
Yeah, it's a reflector, but the reflector is still part of the antenna. The OTA antenna you refer to is made up of dozens of elements, including director, and reflector elements, and "driven" elements. With a C-band system, the probe inside the feedhorn would be referred to as the driven element, and the dish itself as the reflector element. It IS proper to refer to a dish as an antenna. I have a book on antenna theory, and there is a whole chapter on parabolic dish antennas.
I could have the best satellite dish in the world, like a birdview, but if the lnb is outdated, it wont work to well with digital reception.
I agree with the other responses, that the lnb is probably not the problem. If you get analog.
I like my dish, while depeer dishes such as the winegard pinacle, have better control over adjacent satellites, but dont have good gain, the deeper you go, the less gain you have
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This issue has always confused me.
All the equations I've ever seen relate gain to only 2 parameters, the freq and the diameter of the dish. I've never seen an equation in which F/D was related to gain. Also, re the resolution or beamwidth, your control over adjacent satellites thing, the equations I've seen relate that only to gain, ie basically the more gain, the more narrow the pattern of the antenna.
I have owned both a high F/D and a low F/D BUD, and never noticed much difference with respect to gain, at least on C-band. Relative to adjacent sat resolution, the shallow dish seemed to be better, however when I had that dish, all the sats were separated by 3 degrees, so it wasn't as much of an issue back then.
The one big difference I've noticed relative to deep vs shallow dishes, is that with a deep dish, the feedhorn has a harder time illuminating the entire dish, particularly on Ku. My CoRotor only sees about 1/3 of my deep dish BUD on Ku. Basically, it's hard for reflections from the edges of a deep dish to get into the feedhorn. The scalar rings help in this respect for C-band, but I don't think they have much effect on Ku. My old shallow dish BUD was pretty good on Ku.
I think the main advantage of deep dishes is elimination of ground noise, but I think I'd prefer to have my whole dish illuminated and give up a bit of S/N to ground noise.
Anyway, it's always seemed strange to me that the equations don't seem to relate resolution to F/D. It seems intuitive that a shallow (long FL) dish would be better for resolution, since this would be analogous to a long FL camera lens or telescope, where your field of view is very narrow, compared to a short FL lens, which virtually would see the whole sky. Comparing again to a camera or telescope, a low F/D lens generally lets in more light than a high F/D lens.
I think that part of the problem comparing a sat dish to a camera or telescope, however is that generally with a camera or telescope, you are looking for light from the entire field of view, whereas with a sat dish, we're only concerned with a point source, ie the one satellite we're looking for. I think the light gathering advantage of a low F/D lens is lost if we're just looking at a point source within the field of view. I'm thinking that this might be the reason that the gain from a point source is only related to the overall diameter or area of a dish. And the apparent advantages or disadvantages of shallow vs deep dishes with respect to gain are probably all related to the feedhorn illumination issues. Having said that though, it still seems intuitive that a long FL dish should be better for resolution, but I am at a loss for an explanation.
Interesting topic, ie comparison of sat dishes to cameras and telescopes and the point source vs whole field of view issues.