Help with choosing dish

after_shock3000

I'm going setting up a motorised system over the next few weeks and need a little help choosing a dish and lnb.
The last time i bought a cheap 65cm dish and a random universal lnb and the performance was awful. I could get about 40% max signal strength and quality from 28.2E on a pace DS430N skybox and cannot receive anything at all on my Skystar 2 PCI card.I then set up a sky minidish which got 100%/90% on the Pace box and 70% on the skystar.

So after that ordeal I want to get a 1.2m dish and a good lnb to suit it.Basically I want to be able to pick up as much as possible with this dish as I am getting a Moteck SG2100 or Superjack DG120 motor and this is the max dish size.

Can anyone recommend a good dish and lnb? A link to one would be even better.

Any other advice on setting this up would be greatly appreciated also (I'm a complete newbie at all this).

Thanks in advance.

Supercell

Would go for a dish in the 85-100CM range - the bigger the dish the harder to align especially for motorised.
The Technomate 1500CI has a nice tuner and is easy to configure and has great web support so would recommend that starting out.

Best advice is - make sure your mount is perfectly upright, use a spirit level and make sure its right- will save you countless hours of configuration later.

after_shock3000

Thanks for the reply. Would a 100cm dish be big enough to receive from most satellites? Can you recommend any particular brand of dish/lnb?

And i already have a Skystar 2 PCI card so will be using that

watty

110cm/100cm triax is OK if not too exposed. You need VERY good mount K T brackets. etc/

after_shock3000

Bracket won't be a problem. Will be making my own K&T from angle iron.

Dish will be fairly exposed though, will be on a tall pole as it needs to be above the roof (mounting on back wall of the house, and the wall faces NNE).

Would I pick up everything with a 100 triax or would a 110 pull in extra channels?

watty

Triax is 100cm wide and 110cm tall.

Use 2" thick walled pole then.

A satellite Due south (i.e. 5W or 8W for Ireland) is about 29.5 degrees elevation.
For Sky / BBC/ITV if you are 8W, then the elevation for 28E is about 21 degrees.

For 42E Turksat, about 14 degrees, 124 azimuth
For 45W about 21 degrees, 223 Azimuth

if you have angle of ridge, width of house and height of roof ridge above gutter you can calculate the minimum length of pole.

download "free download" from www.smw.se

after_shock3000

Watty: Thanks for the link, great application. I did a fair bit of reading on alignment there too and hopefully I won't have too much trouble with it.

Also I read on another thread that you're using a 110 triax. How do you find the dish in high winds etc? Is it very exposed and is there any movement or buckling etc.?

Found a 110 Triax here (http://www.receiver-profi.de/Satelliten-Antennen/Sat-Antenne-ab-100-cm:::25_45.html) for €96 including postage to Ireland. Is that about as cheap as I'm going to get it?

And what LNB are you using, I really want to get a good LNB to get the max signal out of this dish. Don't want to spend much more than 50 euro on a single output LNB though.

watty

Any modern LNB is "good". Some for the smaller noise figure ones 0.2dB NF are actually less good. Once the NF is below 0.7dB it is irrelevent. Almost all professional LNBs are actually 1dB NF (max). Specs such as typical or average for a NF (Noise Figure) are meaningless.

More important is immunity to spurious signals (i.e. from a Microwave Link, Video sender, WiFi, SCTV or Metro), Phase response for wide digital signals (40M symb / s), Intermodulation (recieve SCPC 1.5M sym/s beside stronger transponder), H & V separatation and accuracy, matching of horn/ scalar rings to dish F/D (usually 0.6, or else the dish needs a custom horn and flanged LNB).

I have never seen proper & usefull specs given for "domestic" LNBs. Buy a recognised brand at about €10 to €20. A €7 model Philips out of Lidl with an analogue receiver works as well for weak satellites as an expensive LNB I have. A 6 year old Sky LNB (grundig) with tab cut off and plastic case filed works almost indistinguishably, only slightly lower quality.

The signal level from LNB is irrelevent. It is ONLY quality measurement that counts. My Quattro LNBs give about 2dB less o/p and the Multiswitch reduces another 4dB, so on the Sky box on longest coax I have only 50% level but almost 100% quality.

€96 euro sounds good.

My dish is about 1.5m above a shed roof and has two houses just far enough away to E & W that I can get 42E and 50W OK. There is a row of houses to the south about 4x distance away, so not too exposed.

It is the largest & heavist I would put on a regular Diseq Motor. It shook alarmingly when wind was gusting about 100kmph the other week . That was the motor gears. the dish and Motor is OK

There is an extra piece of metal that clicks into the the back of the dish mounting bracket that screws direct to rear of dish. Be sure to fit it.

winit

Hi I've just got a new sky dish and want to set it up with a pace sky box that a friend has given me. any tips.
I have it the box connected to my friends dish at the moment and it is giving me no signal strength.
I know my friends dish is working as the signal strength with her amstrad box is 100%
anyone can help..