I knew I'd find it at home
Here is the post....now please note this was done in March so the dates may be off
A while back I had a post where I had 2 dishes on one mast, one of which was upside down. Someone asked what would happen if snow got on it. Well, I have an answer for you.
Friday we got about 8 inches of snow. When I came home, I saw about 3 inches of snow on the upside down dish. It wasn’t heavy wet snow and it wasn’t dry fluffy snow. It was a typical Minnesota snowfall (in between). So I decided to do some testing of signal strengths with and without snow. Here is what I found
Below are 3 pictures....first one is the dish with the snow. Second shows how much was on there (almost 3 inches) and the third is no snow on it. Now it was still snowing lightly when this was done, but the numbers I got with no snow are real close (off by one or two points) to what I normally got. Now keep in mind, I am using an old Dish 5000 receiver for testing and even though the scale goes to 125, even spotbeams max at 100. So 100 is the max.
Below are the signal numbers I received with an 18" dish and 3 inches of snow on it (aimed at 61.5)
TP signal
2 0
4 0
6 59
8 67
10 38
12 66
14 56
16 49
18 57
20 56
22 57
25 61
26 39
27 52
28 0
29 41
30 48
31 50
32 52
not the best numbers....so now I wiped off the dish and retested. Boy did the numbers change
TP signal
2 0
4 0
6 89
8 94
10 77
12 94
14 88
16 84
18 87
20 95
22 88
25 90
26 76
27 84
28 0
29 75
30 81
31 82
32 86
So yes snow on the dish does make a difference. But you have to remember, your dish is mostly vertical whereas the upside down dish is pretty close to horizontal. All and all it was a fun project and only took 10 minutes (and a dry pair of socks).
