I understand that, but 4.5 MHz is pretty bad for even a consumer LNBF.
I guess I was used to, and comparing to the performance of the consumer level LNBs I've had on my big dish. My old Cal Amp lnb, which was poor for even consumer level drifted as much as maybe 1.5 to 2 Mhz at times, but the drift was centered around the correct frequency, and it was usually off by less than 1.5 Mhz. My current big dish LNB, which is still consumer level, ie one of the cheaper Norsat LNBs, is usually within 1 MHz of the correct freq. It's rated at something like +/- 750 KHz.
This
KUL1 was off by 2MHz out of the box, and seems to be temperature dependent. The KUL1 is rated at +/- 1 MHz, but that is at 25 deg C. It's actually fairly stable at whatever temperature it's at, ie it doesn't really "drift" so much as it's freq changes with temperature. For DVB signals, I can deal with it being off freq by altering the LO freq in the receiver setup, but it makes locking on DCII signals difficult because the frequency is determined by the VCT not by the user, and DCII receivers don't have a LO setting in the setup. High SR signals lock in pretty quickly, but it can take 5 minutes for narrow SR signals to be found, and sometimes it finds the wrong signal.
But you're probably right about the you get what you pay for, as I think I paid more for even my cheapest big dish LNB than I did for this little LNBF. I've never figured out why an LNB should be more expensive than an LNBF, but they seem to be.
Part of my problem is that while there seems to be a fairly good selection of LNBFs out there, most of them seem to be universal, and since I also do DCII, I need a standard, and it seems like I'm pretty much limited to either the KUL1 or the Invacom. I'm curious with respect to whether anyone knows of any other "standard" lnbfs that have good frequency accuracy and stability? I probably could just get another KUL1, and it would probably be better than the one I have, but I think that I'm going to give the Invacom a try.