Mercury..user defined vs 10750 lnbf

[wejones]

I was playing around with my Mercury today, and noticed something weird.
I have 2 different dishes going into the Mercury via a switch. One of these has an lnbf that drifts with temperature. I noticed that my freqs were off by about 3 mhz on that lnbf, so I decided to change the LO freq for that dish in the antenna setup.
When I had these dishes connected to my Fortec Lifetime, I think I just changed the LO freq in the Standard lnbf type, however I noticed that the Mercury has a "User Defined" lnbf type, so I thought that perhaps I'd use that instead of the regular 10750 lnbf.
So I went into User Defined, and edited that LO freq to be 10747, to match the LO drift in my lnbf. Then I went to do a power scan, and noticed that instead of the scan being from 11700-12200, that it came up with a default scan of 11697-12897 . ????? All the transponders scanned in at proper freqs though, so I guess it wasn't important.
But being curious, I then changed it to the 10750 lnbf type, and edited THAT to be 10747. After saving, I went back to the power scan, and power scan still said 10750, but was scanning things in with the 10747 LO freq, and the scan range was at it's normal 11700-12200 range. This is more normal, however since the LO freq shows up as being 10750 even when you have actually changed it, it's kind of more difficult to keep track of whether you've changed it or not. With my Lifetime and Ultra, I'm pretty sure that it listed the LO freq as whatever you've set it at.


Anyway, at this point, I went back and set the lnbf type back to User Defined again, to check something out, and I found that even though I had previously saved this as 11747, it had now re-set itself back to 10750!?!?! Then I went back to the 10750 lnbf type, and although I had set it to be 10747 too, it too had re-set itself to 10750. What this means is after you save these things, you can't change the lnbf type or it will reset the LO freq to it's default setting. I would have thought that changes wouldn't be wiped out unless you saved some setting, but I guess not.

Anyway, not an important issue for most people, but it's annoying for anyone with a drifting lnbf.

[wejones]

I'm still having issues with this. Haven't used the Mercury for about a week, and it's been relatively cold. Went to use it today, and I notice that PBS on AMC3 is breaking up on me, jumping from strong signals down to nothing. I noticed that when I did a blind scan, that the freqs are WAY OFF.
I checked the lnbf freq that I had set into the sat I have defined for the Primestar dish with the KUL1, and it has reverted to 10750, even though last time I used the system, I had it offset by 2 or 3 MHz. Anyway, I re-saved the offset LO freq, deleted all my channels, and re-scanned, and the freqs were back on. But I was still seeing some breaking up, so I switched over to my 90CM/Invacom quad. It was breaking up too, however it had been switched off for the past week, so I'm assuming that it needs to be run a while to stabilize perhaps??? So I switched back to the Primestar, and it was even worse. Checked the LO freq, and it had reverted back to 10750 again. ?????? Ie I can't seem to retain the altered LO freq if I change it.
I'm just curious whether anyone else has ever tried to change the LO freq to match a drifting LNBF, or do you just use blind scan and accept whatever freq shows up?
Actually, I don't think that the freq drift is what is causing the signal to break up, particularly since it's happening on both dishes, while my big dish seems stable on the same signals. So I'm guessing that it is my DiseqC switch kicking in and out. I was about to go out to the dish, and bypass the DiseqC switch as a test, but just as I was about to do that, the signal seems to have stabilized, and now it's not breaking up anymore.

I'm really starting to think though, that I need to find some way to keep both lnbfs powered up though, because in the upcoming cold weather, I don't want to have to wait for an hour for these things to stabilize. But other than running another coax out to the dish, I'm not quite sure how to do this.