Quote:
Originally Posted by rainman
I do consider part of the alignment process is making sure the motor is set to zero. besides it makes the rest of the setup a lot easier once you get zeroed in on your true south sat the rest just fall in to place. I am not saying usals is better just easier to align the dish.  |
Ok, although I consider that syncing rather than alignment. But I've never seen this mentioned in anyone's list of alignment steps. Plus it is unclear whether it's even possible with some motors. I know my
SG2100 has the hard reset button, but some other motors don't, and it's never quite spelled out anywhere exactly what these hard and soft resets do, which is part of the reason I've never done it to my motor.
Re the above suggestion that somehow the receiver is involved, that's very possible, but I've not seen it. Ie the receiver is responsible for calculating the actual "X", ie the USALS angle that it has to tell the motor to go to in the GOTO-X command. THis isn't just a simple calculation, as it requires trigonometry, or perhaps it could be done via a lookup table. It's possible that some receivers don't have the required math subroutines in the firmware and just do an approximation, or perhaps they actually made a mistake.
I know that I"ve checked the calculations that the Lifetime and Ultra do, and they seem to be correct to within a tenth of a degree or so (ie they list the USALS angle by the "MOVE" button). I don't think the
Mercury tells you what angle it's going to, so I don't know about it. However TSREADER, which isn't actually a receiver, but it's a program that controls receiver cards like the
Twinhan, seems to do the calculation wrong, although I'm not positive. I posted about this a couple weeks ago after I tried using that feature for the first time, and it sent my dish to a different place than my other receivers did. Perhaps it isn't a finished feature of TSREADER yet. The DiseqC-1.2 in TSREADER works fine. But anyway, it's possible that some receivers don't do the calculation right, but I've never heard of any examples other than TSREADER.