Ok, this is just an experience report to note some complicated
installation for those DYI'ers.
Everyone knows that all these satellite equipment come with very poor, or non-existent documentation. I ordered a 36" Dish with the
Sadoun PowerTech DG280B motor. I ran into a couple of issues that I am sure will confuse the newbie doing a first time install.
There was no documentation on how the dish mount attaches to the motor and I know some motors mount with the pole down and some with the pole up. When I got ready to mount the dish bracket to the motor, I found that there is one through bolt from the bracket that goes through the motor's pole to keep the dish true to the line of the motor. The problem was that the hole through the motor pole was only open on one side, and it confused me. From experience, I knew this through bolt had to go through both the dish bracket and the motor pole, but a newbie wouldn't have known. I took the thru bolt and felt a recess on the other side of the pipe, so I figured that I could tap it through the hole and make my own hole. It worked because the thickness of the metal on the otherside was thin enough. Obviously, during the manufacture the through hole was not completed. It was inspected, but this one got by them. I just feel sorry for the new do-it-yourselfer who would be totally confused about this silly little thing.
The next problem I had with this motor was that it would not move east beyond the due south. Also it wasn't taking commands clearly from my
Mercury II very clearly. I aimed the dish and got good signal a couple of times to find that the motor wasn't acting right. Everyone knows what a pain
aiming a dish can be. Needle in a haystack... So, I continued fiddling with it including trying the reset procedures stated in the book. I don't know if it even reset. It says to unplug the coax cable and reinstall the coax cable. This didn't work. It also says to hold down both the east and west buttons for 5 seconds. I don't know if this worked since every time I did this, the motor would move west. I fiddled more with the Mercury and more with the cables and somehow it got working again and was able to move east past the due south. And of course I had to re-aim the dish because of the motor not being right on the previous aim. I think what I did was tune on a couple of satellites a certain distance apart and then it figured the maths to get the other satellites. In essance, this motor was not plug and play for USALS. I had to set some satellites with Disquec to get it going right. Plug-and-play would be great with this satellite equipment...
Now I have the motor working and will see how well it keeps going. A couple of nice things about it is that it has a very good fine tune ability for moving to a satellite. Also, a nice detail on its construction is that there is a clear arrow point on its elevation angle setting. We can be very precise aiming it. Very nice, since the the dish bracket has a sloppy red paint job for setting its angle and there is over an 1/8" of play as to know where to mount it.
These manufacturers need to create better literature for the installations with more detail and better english. They should not be written by non-english speaking people (sarcasm) who are not familiar with the installations and should be proof-read. Maybe they should get Ikea to write their assembly manuals....
Linear Mode
