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Originally Posted by DLR
Hi ya'll,
I have been reading up and learning all I can about FTA. So far what I have came to is that I want to get the captiveworks 1000 and a motorized dish. My problem is that I live in the country and have DTV but thats just for 1 bird. I have a line of sight problem, TREE's, lots and lots of tree's. what I need to know is will a larger dish compensate for obstructions? if not, can I put the dish up high enough using rigid conduit and guy wire to prevent sway? I have read that the max cable run for RG6 is 125'. I will have to go way over that in order to get a clear line of sight. we are planning on having the land cleared (10 acres or so) by selling the tree's to a logging company. but that is down the line a few months. does anyone have any suggestions to get me going in the right direction?
Edit:found this sight to be most knowledgable and really impressed with soudons prices on some items. the motorized dish will definatly be comming from here whenever I do make my jump. sure do wish they carried the captiveworks!
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I live in the woods too. I had to do a lot of searching to find the one spot where I could see a good deal of the sky. My dishes are looking over some trees, and under other thees and through some holes in others. I have gotten very good with a rope saw to take off limbs high up in the trees.
But to your question, a big dish may help a bit, but unless the tree is sparse, it's usually a killer. Usually, if you can see a good deal of sky through the tree limbs, you have a chance, but if not, you don't have a chance. And the further away the trees are, the worse your chances. I've even demonstrated that I could receive through a sheet of plywood if the plywood is right in front of the LNBF, however if you put the plywood several feet out in front of the dish, it kills the signal. (Ie it's more of a scattering thing than absorbtion thing, and the further away the further away the scattering takes the signal. Same with rain fade.) Also, pine trees are worse than disiduous (?sp?) trees, at least when the leaves are dry. I have a few sats that I can receive when the leaves are dry, but after a rain or snow, when the leaves are wet, I lose reception. Also, I have several sats that I can see in the winter when the leaves are off the trees, but I can't see in the summer.
What I would recommend is to wait for a bit more than a week, and during that time look at Lyngsat, and decide what sats you are interested in viewing. Also you can use one of several web pages to find the Azimuth/Elevation to each sat, then you can use the USNO tables or one of several programs to find out when the Sun will be at that Az/El. This is because during about the first week of October, the sun will be following the Clarke belt fairly well for those in the northern hemisphere, so you can get a pretty good idea of where to put your dish by looking at where you have a view of the sun. There was also a web page posted by someone that would predict
solar outages for specific satellites.
Anyway, by finding out where the sats are, you can better choose your site, and also decide which trees might be cut down, etc.
Relative to the length of COAX, the 125' maximum coax length you mention is just plain wrong. As far as signal is concerned, I wouldn't worry until you get up over 300', and even then it is possible to use amplifiers, although I wouldn't try that with a motor powered through the coax. There is some question regarding how long the coax can be before the DiseqC commands have trouble getting to the motor. I'm running something in the range of 250' myself. Signal is no problem for me, but for a while I was having problems controlling the motor, but for the past week or so, it's been working fine. In my case, my dish isn't really that far away, however it is on the opposite side of my garage, so the cable has to go into the garage, up into the attic of the garage across the garage into the 2nd floor of my house, then follows the pipes down into my basement and across to the other side of the basement where my receivers are. When I first installed my big dish sat system here about a decade ago, I located my receiver up in the second floor of the house, which reduced the cable run by about 75', but then I had about 75' of A/V line to get to my TV, which turned out to be more of a difficulty than the additional RF cable. But anyway, you can certainly go up to 250' of coax, and probably more.