Yesterday, I was playing with my new 3' dish. I put on some new thin mirrors, found a new focal point and made an LNBF adapter, and decided to try to hook up the lnbf for the first time and try to find my true south sat for the first time with this dish. Yeah. :-)
Well, rather than sinking a pole (I still haven't found a place to install this dish), I bolted a 3x3 board to a fairly big log section, which I thought was heavy enough to support the dish (it's OK on flat ground, but not on sloped ground I found out.). I mounted the dish, and made an adapter to hold the lnbf at what I thought was a better focal point than where the lnbf arm put the lnbf. I hooked the lnbf up directly to my old lifetime receiver (which doesn't have blind search). I decided to find my true south sat, since it wouldn't require much fiddlling with the polarity. My true sough sat is AMC6. I looked on Lyngsat, and it looked like the only full time signal on that sat was some Gospel Network or something. To make sure it was really there, I tuned my big dish to AMC6, and the channel was there, and it was a very strong signal.
So I loaded that Gospel channel into my Lifetime, and went outside with my little hand held meter. Problem was, however, that my lnbf adapter was enough off center, that the sat positions would be quite a bit to the east of where I'd normally expect to see them. So I searched east, with my hand held meter, and found a signal. Went to the Lifetime, but it didn't seem to be the AmC6 channel. I made a guess that I might be looking at Echo-3, so I tried several of the Echo-3 transponders, and found one that identified what I was seeing as Echo-3. So I moved the sat a bit further west, however there was a big tree in my way. So I moved the whole contraption, log, dish and all up out of my driveway to a place where I was pretty sure I could see over the tree, and tried again. First found Echo-3 again, then moved west, found another sat, which proved to be SBS6, so I moved in between, found a fairly strong signal on my hand held meter. This HAD to be AMC6 I thought. Went back to my Lifetime..... NOTHING... strong signal, but no quality (does this sound familiar?) From the strength of the signal, I thought that I HAD to be on a satellite strong enough to receive something, so I looked at Lyngsat, and looked at all the nearby satellites, and tried known transponders on all the nearby satellites, but nothing would lock in. I spent an hour or two, moving between SBS6 and Echo-3, but kept coming back to this mystery signal, but I could not lock on to the Gospel channel. So I finally decided to take off my lnbf adapter, and I mounted the lnbf using the stock holder. Moved the dish and found Echo3, moved the dish to the west and found my mystery satellite, but the Gospel channel would NOT lock in. I spent another hour or so trying to find what sat I was on, but couldn't find any other sat transponder that would lock.
So I decided to run a coax inside to my Ultra so I could do a blind search on this signal. Had to disconnect a coax from my TREE DISH, and connect the other end of this to my Ultra. Did a blind search, and found a 10 or 12 channels, all quite strong. I checked the channels with a NON-Lyngsat database I use (I should have used this in the first place.), and all the channels turned out to be from AMC6! So my mystery satellite WAS AMC6, and I was getting VERY STRONG signals. However the Gospel network was NOT one of the channels that came up in the blind search.
Confused, I went back to my big dish, and the Gospel network was gone! However a minor bump of the dish tuning, and I got it back, however the quality had dropped from about 90% that I had in the morning to something like 40%, ie very poor signal. But it was still there. Went back and forth between the big dish, and the new 3' dish, and all the other transponders were as strong or stronger on my new dish, but I just couldn't get the Gospel channel on the new dish.
This was quite confusing. The lnbf I bought for the new dish was the standard
KUL1 , and I was thinking that perhaps it wasn't stable enough to lock a narrow (SR=2573) transponder.
Anyway, I was so tired from fooling with this thing all day that I quit for the day, but left the thing running on that channel. Turned on the TV this morning, and what was up, but the GOSPEL channel. Full strength signal, like 93/99%, about as strong as anything I've ever seen on my receivers.
Anyway, I'm confused. Has anyone else tried tuning this channel? Ie do they vary their signal strength, or are my LNBs drifting enough that I'm having problems following the signal and locking it???
I have no interest in actually watching this channel, but I'm annoyed by the fact that it wasted about 4 hours of my time trying to find it yesterday, and I'm curious why my system couldn't lock yesterday, yet locks fine this morning. Only thing that makes sense is freq drift on my lnbs, however my big dish lnb has never had any problem in this respect, and I've been able to lock signals even narrower than SR=2000, and yet even the big dish had problems with this one.
Any ideas?