Tip for using Dish 500 on 119/129

[M Sparks]

I realize this information will apply to very few people, but if anyone is looking to use a DISH 500 to get 119 and 129, here's some help.

Swinging the dish 9 degrees to the right will get you in the ballpark, but the 129 signal will be weak and unreliable. If you adjust the skew to match the skew for a DISH 1000, you'll be much closer. I also elevated the dish a degree or two. (You can download a DISH1000 installation manual.)

I also reccomend peaking the dish on 129, not 119. Since there is an extra degree of separation, I found it's better to lose a few signal points on the 119 side.

In the end, I wound up getting 65-80 on 129 and 70-90 on 110, with my spotbeam still getting a 124 reading.

In case you're wondering why I did this...I have always had a weak signal on 110 due to giant Pondarosa Pines. Moving my 148 dish to 129 resulted in a good signal, but I was having trouble with my legacy switches getting even transponders on 129. I finally decided to replace my LNBs with DISHPros.

A dealer friend got me a DISH 1000 for less than what the LNBs would have cost separately. I put them in my old dishes, which solved the switch problem, but I still suffered from an unreliable 110 signal.

Today, I tried installing the DISH 1000 on my old 500 mast. My 110 signal went from unreliable to unuseable, and my 129 dropped slightly. I moved the whole thing over to the DISH 300 mast. It wound up looking STRAIGHT at the top of the tallest pine, bringing up 110 quite a bit, but killing 119.

I thought about remounting further down the house, but I was worried about blocking 129. Moving it down to the far corner would probably put 110 behind a DIFFERENT tree.

So, I took the DISH 1000 down, swung the DISH 300 to 110, and pointed the 500 at 119/129. Now everything's nice and stable.

 

[Stargazer]

If you make sure that your mast/pole is plumb on all sides then it will make your skew and evelation numbers true from what the manual says those numbers should be. Otherwise it will make it difficult to tune in the signals.

 

[M Sparks]

My point was, the skew/elevation angles for 119/129 are different than 110/119. Obviously, a non-level mast will cause all kinds of problems. But that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

I'm sure the Dish 1000 skew is not perfectly ideal for a 500, but it's closer than the original skew. But since there are no published skew/elevation charts for this configuration, I was just trying to point others in the right direction.

I realize this info will not be useful for most. I now have a stable signal on all three sats for the first time- If this helps one other person out, it will be worth posting.