[wejones]

Originally Posted by boz

I think I might have a workaround for you, but I'm not sure as I've never tried it exactly. However, I have inverted a pole-end mount on a HH motor like yours, and it did work fine.

It appears the dish mount is made to mount at the end of a pole, so it doesn't have any offset from the pole to allow the dish to clear. So to get around this, you need to place the dish mount on the end of the motor shaft, except inverted from how you have it now. The problem with this is that the mount will not adjust to enough negative elevation to work and you would run across the same clearance problem.

I think if you take the shaft off the motor, and rotate it by 180 degrees, and then put the dish mount on the end, again inverted, and put the dish on the mount non-inverted, you'll find enough clearance to make it all work.

The motor shaft being oriented down and away from the pole and having the mount inverted at the end, will push the dish out away from the motor housing. Then you'll have to calculate a new dish angle, but it can be done. Of course, if you are really precise with the motor angle, and have a good true-south sat, you can adjust the dish angle by trial-and-error.

I'm just not sure that the shaft can be rotated. I've removed the shaft from one before to facilitate mounting, but I've never tried turning it around.

What have you got to lose?

Interesting idea, and one that hurts my head to think about. And I guess it's worth a try, it might just work, but I'm not sure if I agree (or understand) the "dish mount on the end, again inverted" part above. Ie assuming you mean turn that whole mount upside down and use the hole at the end, then... it will look weird, but it might just work.

But before I forget, I'm confused a bit about the calculation in the initial post. Ie the 40 - 6.6 thing. For the SG2100, the calculation should be 30 minus declination, and for a latitude of 44, you should be using 6.0 instead of 6.6, so you should be aiming for 24 degrees not 33 degrees. HOWEVER, from the picture, I can see that YOUR SG2100 is entirely different from MY SG2100, even with respect to where the motor mount bolts connect, so it's entirely possible that the shaft on your mount DOES have a 40 degree bend rather than the 30 deg bend that I have in the shaft in MY SG2100.
But from the picture, it doesn't look like even using the 24 degrees, you can't get enough elevation with that dish mount. The bend in the motor shaft on MY SG2100 is 30 degrees, so looking for a declination of -6 degrees, you'd need an elevation of around 24 deg as I said above (or 34 if indeed the shaft angle is 40 instead of 30). If you have that shaft reversed by 180, then you have a positive elevation of 30 degrees from the motor shaft, and you'll need a negative (upside down) elevation of 36 degrees on the dish mount scale for it to work (or 46 if your bend is 40 deg). I still can't visualize this whole thing to figure out if you can get that mount to fit on the other side of that shaft without hitting the motor, but it looks like it just might fit.

HOWEVER, if it doesn't fit, perhaps there might be other options. If your shaft bend is 30 deg, you might possibly get enough clearance by drilling another hole through the shaft about 3/4 of an inch below the current hole. That might allow the bracket to incline a bit more while further away from the motor itself. You might experiment with this without the bolt in the bracket to figure out if it has a chance of working.

Another option might be to completely eliminate the inside portion of your current bracket, and try to adapt a Sadoun pole mount bracket ( ie http://www.sadoun.com/Sat/Products/F...Pole+Mount.jpg ) to somehow fit inside the part of your bracket that connects to the dish. It would take a bit of drilling and bolting, but should be possible. The scale on the pole mount bracket would be completely meaningless, but it's relatively meaningless in many installations anyway.

Anyway, this is a strange combination of a mount that seems to be designed to be mounted on top of a pole and a motor that has a shaft aiming down, plus you have what seems to be perhaps a newer version of the SG2100, plus a dish bracket that as the other poster said "just doesn't look right" for some reason (I thnk because the angle indications are upside down, even though the bracket isn't upside down) . Overall a strange combination. I think it's possible to get it to work, but it will take some work.