My advice is hook up your motor !!
I spent a week or two manually pointing my dish, and mostly being able to hit the powerful echostar birds, but not the smaller ones. Once you have your motor set up, the extra hands-on time you get with your receiver will answer many of your questions .
Scanning a bird :
If you simply do an FTA scan of a satellite, your receiver only looks for the transponders listed in it's lookup table. If you do a blind scan ( or a power scan ) the receiver uses a systematic approach ( sometimes configurable by you ) to find all the active transponders. Your receiver cannot tell whether or not a transponder is active without "concentrating" ( my human word ) on the frequency of that transponder .
Yes, the "aim" must be right to get all the transponders. Even then, it's possible that some transponders are so weak that only a larger dish with a more sensitive receiver can lock on them ( transponders like that are probably not in use, because they are in fact pretty useless ).
That's about all the flummery I have at the moment, except that I don't like all that cable out there. I improved my signal strength considerably by getting down to about 80 feet from 125 feet originally.
You'll get more feedback, this is a great place for FTA support.
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Searching the sky with a Fortec Star 80cm dish, Invacom qph031 quad LNB, STABS HH90 motor, on
a Buzz Plus .
And a Fortec Star 90 cm dish, Invacom QPH031, Moteck SG-2100 and a Mercury II.
The official neighborhood crazy guy ! 
"I shop at Sadoun Satellite Sales www.sadoun.com "
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