Quote:
Originally Posted by Tim Godsil
Since everyone is still calling me a nut about circular primestar lnb's leme show you some pics. .....
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Boy, both of those lnbfs are MUCH different from any of the Primestar lnbfs I've had. The ones I've had are cylindrical, about the size of a can of tomato paste, ie not flat like shown above. Also, when I take them apart, there is nothing visible in them similar to the can modules shown in the pictures above (not sure what they are.... I assume that they are oscillator modules). All I see in mine are small components. It's possible that if I unsoldered the circuit board that there might be something mounted on the other side, sort of inside the wave guide area, but I don't think there is space. I took some pictures of the insides of one of mine, but haven't taken them off camera yet, but they're probably not of interest anyway, as I think my lnbf is older and more common.
However, while digging through my stores of old lnbfs, etc, I ran across a REALLY old LNBF, that came off a "home cable system" of some kind, that was marketed back in the MD/DEL/PA area back in the late 80's I think. But this is a standard lnbf, and I used it briefly at one point in time. However, on looking at it yesterday, I noticed that it has 2 places to connect a coax to it. One, the regular port that goes to the receiver, and a second one, which had a little cap attached via a chain, and this port was labeled as "TP". I don't know what this TP port is. I thought that perhaps it might be a "test point" where you could connect a voltmeter, perhaps to be used similar to an in-line signal strength meter???? I know that back then, many receivers had a "meter" port that you could connect a regular voltmeter to, to read signal strength. I really like that approach BTW, except that on the receivers, it only read the transponder you were tuned to, rather than the whole 950-1450 band. But I've used this on a couple occasions to find sats when I didn't have an inline meter, and I couldn't get a TV out to the dish, but did have an old receiver handy.
I don't know if this old lnbf still works, since I've taken it apart a few times, being curious about what was inside, but if it does still work, I may hook it up and experiment with this "TP" connection, just to see what it does.
Is anyone familiar with this kind of lnbf with a "TP" connection? It's a General Instruments lnbf, and the home cable system came with an old General Instruments receiver, which I also still have. Last time I used it, it still worked, however the audio never worked on it (it had some specific audio freq or something and the receiver didn't allow you to adjust the audio freq), so I always had to use it with a stand-alone satellite audio subcarrier receiver (which I still have, and it still works, but soon there will be absolutely nothing that it will receive).
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