bandstacked approach:
Here is a
bandstacked C-band feedhorn and LNB.
It's also available without scalar.
Scroll about half way down the page for a
Ku bandstacked LNBf.
Alternately, the FSS LNB off a Dish Network discontinued Superdish (105° model) will work.
I want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. By "bandstacked" you mean that one polarity is on a low frequency band and the other polarity is on a higher frequency band, correct?
And that would mean that the satellite receiver would have to support a bandstacked LNB, and I'm assuming that not all of them do (or is that an incorrect assumption)?
And, you say there is a bandstacked LNB for C-Band, which I assume fits the standard large dish (I see you can get it with or without the scalar ring) and also one for Ku, which I assume fits any regular smaller Ku dish. But now the obvious question - is there such a thing as a bandstacked combination C/Ku LNB? I would expect such an LNB to have two outputs, one for the C-Band side and one for the Ku-Band side (I note that some non-bandstacked combo LNB's have a built-in 22 kHz tone switch if you want to use one lead to switch between the two) but I wonder why they would make stacked C-band LNBs and stacked Ku LNBs, but not a stacked combo unit - seems like a natural thing to have if you have a large C-band dish.
Reason I ask is because my large C/Ku dish is moveable using a positioner arm, but none of my small Ku dishes are. I was thinking about perhaps using one of those DiSEQc activated positioners but none (yet) will set the skew. I'm not sure if you could have two different movable dishes (one large for C-band and one smaller for Ku band) connected to the same receiver(s) (I'm not going to even get into the issue here of trying to share one or two movable dish(es) with two different receivers, either of which might want to change the dish position - that concept would really make my head hurt).
And speaking of skew, one other thing confuses me. Right now with my large dish, I have to set optimum V and H skew settings for each satellite (via my old analog box which I'm using to move the dish and set the skew), and they tend to differ as you move across the arc (if I recall correctly, there's about a ten or fifteen degree difference in skew as you get out toward the far edge of the arc, though I may be a bit off on that). With the newer feedhorns that don't have the small polarity switch (that little blue box that sometimes decides to go bad during the worst part of winter
) I wonder how you deal with the different skew settings for the different satellites. Do you just pick a satellite that somewhere near the middle of your visible arc and peak on that one and hope for the best on all the others, or is there actually some way to compensate for the changing skew across the arc that I'm not seeing? Or, are those type of feedhorns only intended for use with fixed dishes (a dish locked down on a single satellite)?
Just when I've finally figured out how my system works, something new comes out and I have to ask (possibly dumb) questions to understand the new stuff!