One more question...what is the lowest quality level that one can generally lock in a station with? 30%? 40%? 50%? Should I have reason to believe that I should lock something showing betweem 30-40% quality?
Is there an "info" button? Press that while on what you think is a station.
At least on my Ultra, it shows a stacked bar graph of the connection information, and it has a "lock" indicator.
In regards to #3 in your post, it is not the weakest link - getting your south compass heading perfect. The reason is you want everything pointing at your mag south, with the motor in the center "zero", then you MOVE using USALS to the highest South Sat. Your motor will not move much. Now you adjust the whole contraption on the pole side to side, and the dish elevation till you get locked in on that Sat.
The issue is USALS does a lot of the work for getting your motor lined up in the right spot on the pole. Fine tuning of course is necessary.
As said in the last couple posts, getting your motor scale to your Latitude is important, as it should not be adjusted once set.
I find it very peculiuar that the
Mercury II does this with signal levels - gives you higher "quality" indication before "signal" indication. That just doesnt make any sense, and seems to contradict all the previous models of Fortec on how they display signal lock. I was hoping to "win" the free Sadoun giveaway a couple months ago, just to see how this Mercury operates. I have 2 receivers already (one's back in the box) and a 3rd is just not in the picture (pun intended...) for me at this point.
Well good luck. Getting these to link in the 1st time can be a very frustrating experinece.