Well, I thought that the mirror thing was ingenious and knew right away you were an innovative guy (person of choice if ever stranded on a deserted island)!
I put up nine little mirrors, in a cross configuration like yours. At first, I had the outer mirrors right at the edge of the dish, but later decided to make the cross a little smaller because I kept blocking the sun on a few of them while trying to tilt the dish and hold a piece of stiff cardboard near the lnbf.
I couldn't get them all to come to a point, but the closest they came was about an area the size of the face of the lnbf. I got these mirrors from a small disco ball I bought from the local dollar store (I just love what you can find in these bargain stores
). They weren't the completely flat ones that you used. I think they had a glass thickness of about 2mm. Might have thrown off the focal point a bit.
On another note, I tried something that was interesting. I had my 75cm dish pointing to AMC4 (101W), TP freq 12120V. I covered up parts of the dish with my two hands together simulating an obstruction. I found that the top of the dish was the most sensitive area to obstruction. The right and left sides were not particularly affected by my two hands.
On still another note, I recall from my astronomy course way back in university, that you could combine the signal from two or more dishes in an array which would give a resolution equal to a dish that was the diameter of the distance from the furthest dishes of the array. For example, if you had two 100cm dishes side by side touching each other (and obviously pointing in the same direction) the resolution of the signal would be equal to having a 200cm dish. If there was a receiver that could combine signals from two or more dishes of an array then you could conceivably receive
C-band transmission from two smaller dishes. Wouldn't that be cool!
