Quote:
Originally Posted by Curtisstarr
My question is whether I need a 6' dish always to recieve a c band station. there is really one that I am interested and the lyngsat information told me that a smaller dish would be acceptable. Any comments? |
? You say "there is really one that I am interested" ... do you mean that there is one station you are interested in? If so, what station on what sat?
In general though, I agree with the recommendation that you need at least 6', and in my opinion, the Lyngsat dish size recommendations for C-band are WAY off. However that depends a bit on exactly what transponder or sat you're trying to receive, and with what receiver. There are some people here who have used a 4' dish for C-band, but with a dish that small, you will not get all channels. Some people have also reported receiving some C-band with a 3' dish, however if you're talking about receiving video one of the satellites that are over the US, I would say that the odds are against you being able to receive anything with a 3' dish, unless it is a very strong narrow band channel without any nearby interferrence.
The problem with respect to receiving C-band with a 3' dish is that with a 3' dish, in addition to the fact that the dish gain is about one third of the gain for Ku, you are basically receiving about 5 sats at the same time, instead of just one, because the beamwidth is so much wider. So instead of just trying to get a reasonable signal to noise based on normal background noise, you have all the noise coming from the adjacent satellites as well.
So unless the particular "station" you're looking for happens to be very strong, and a very narrow signal that doesn't happen to have any interferring signals on adjacent sats, then the odds are not with you.