Bad Luck, No Luck, & Frustrated! Advice, Please?

[elgemcdlf]

Bob,
Ever hear of Kentucky windage? Rainman should be an expert here I think you are simply overanalyzing the situation. Just because you have all your settings perfect does not mean they are correct Just a starting point. Let's start again. What sat do you have signal on? Where is your motor when you have this signal? How far east and west can you go and still have signal? With the motor not moving on the mount. So if your signal is coming from your true south sat and you can (with USALS) get 3 sats east and 3 west you are pretty close to centered on true south. And you are either to low or to high with declination (dish elevation) adjust however you wish and adjust the motor elevation in the oposite direction the same amount. Now check to see what you have. Forget about your angle guages, protractors, yardsticks, etc. Leave any signal meter you own in the house Take simply the TV and a receiver outside with you.

[rainman]

oh yeah kentucky windage.LOL alot like a rule of thumb.

[radiobob]

Originally Posted by Reinhold

Radiobob,
if you want to be able to rotate your motor all the way,you should have an electrician put a 1 foot offset in a piece of conduit.You can mount that on your tower and then your motor on it.This should give you the clearance you need.If you don't know any electrician,maybe you could get it done at a muffler shop.
Reinhold.

Thanks, Reinhold... Good thoughts!

As it turns out, I actually am able to motor the dish through its entire path. I'm just not sure how well I can manhandle the whole assembly around.

BTW, my bro-in-law is a top-notch electrician, so I guess I can always call in a favor if need be!

Thanks,
Bob

Originally Posted by elgemcdlf

I think you are simply overanalyzing the situation. Just because you have all your settings perfect does not mean they are correct Just a starting point. Let's start again. What sat do you have signal on? Where is your motor when you have this signal?

Me? Overanalyze? Why, that's my middle name!

The sum total of what I can pick up:

AMC3: Muslim TV Ahmadiyya Intl 11734-V 6102 (no luck on PBS, Montana PBS, etc.)
AMC4: KUIL 11707-V 2170
3ABN 11819-H 5700 (English & Spanish Channels)
Hope/Esperanza 11983-H 5900 (reception varies)

...none of which, of course, is from my "true south" sat. The motor azimuth indicator seems to be where it should be for each of these sats (kinda hard to know for sure staring upward through my bifocals). If I'm off, it's not by much.

How far east and west can you go and still have signal? With the motor not moving on the mount.

Huh? You mean how far E-W by driving the dish? I can get signal all over the joint, just nothing usable. I think I don't understand your question. Are you talking about how far east/west I can go and still get useable stuff?

So,if your signal is coming from your true south sat and you can (with USALS) get 3 sats east and 3 west you are pretty close to centered on true south. And you are either to low or to high with declination (dish elevation) adjust however you wish and adjust the motor elevation in the oposite direction the same amount. Now check to see what you have. Forget about your angle guages, protractors, yardsticks, etc. Leave any signal meter you own in the house

I like the way you think!

Take simply the TV and a receiver outside with you.

I've done that a bunch. I'm not whining when I tell you it's a challenge. I should've mounted the dish lower down the tower (I guess I still could) so I don't have to haul the TV up to the top of the ladder and tie it in place! It's also been brutally hot--not that that's stopped me!

Thanks for the suggestions; Your support means a lot. I'm gonna keep plugging away.

Bob

[elgemcdlf]

Ok if I remember correctly 91 is your south sat. Did you drive the motor with USALS to get 87 or is that what you have with the motor on 0? If you are not getting PBS on 87 you are off a hair on adjustment for that sat BUT if your motor is pointed at 0 when receiving 87 you are off e-w. You would need to rotate the motor on the mount (tower) 4 degrees to the west.

This would also make your elevation / declination off. At this point raise your declination (dish elevation) until you find signal.

Concept being your true south sat is the highest sat in the sky for your location. So if you are getting 87 and your motor is at 0 you are to low as 87 would be lower on the arc and would be to the east of what you are trying to hit.

If you drove to 87 with USALS it kinda does not matter but could also be used. Just a bit rougher for someone starting out.

[radiobob]

Originally Posted by elgemcdlf

Ok if I remember correctly 91 is your south sat. Did you drive the motor with USALS to get 87 or is that what you have with the motor on 0? If you are not getting PBS on 87 you are off a hair on adjustment for that sat BUT if your motor is pointed at 0 when receiving 87 you are off e-w. You would need to rotate the motor on the mount (tower) 4 degrees to the west.

This would also make your elevation / declination off. At this point raise your declination (dish elevation) until you find signal.

Concept being your true south sat is the highest sat in the sky for your location. So if you are getting 87 and your motor is at 0 you are to low as 87 would be lower on the arc and would be to the east of what you are trying to hit.

If you drove to 87 with USALS it kinda does not matter but could also be used. Just a bit rougher for someone starting out.

The motor is mounted so that when set to 0, it is at what I determine to be true south; driving the dish by USALS seems to leave me a few degrees off, indicating to me that my mount may well be a few degrees off. I remotely drove the dish (by hand, not USALS) until I achieved highest signal/quality--first on AMC 4 (just because I could receive it, not because I was choosing it as my south sat), then onto AMC 3 where I stumbled into reception. When pointed at AMC3 at 87 (my 174 terrestrial), the indicator on the motor is a few notches clockwise as you face the "neck" of the motor.

I've edged the dish mount up and down to what seems to be highest signal/quality. Granted, I'm doing this with a satellite that is not my true south bird, so my results won't be especially useful for tracking other satellites; my initial intent was just to verify that I could pick up something.

A big challenge remains that I still haven't been able to get anything solid to verify when I am on Galaxy 11 at 91 or IA 8 at 89 (to establish once and for all what my "true south" is). This includes setting the TV and receiver on the ladder and then steering the motor to a degree east or west of indicated 0 (south), depending on satellite, then manhandling the setup, motor and dish together E-W in tiny steps, then nudging the dish elevation up and down.

Simply put, even with carefully chosen, supposedly active transponders for a given sat, and deliberate, careful movements, I never get a for-sure lock on that particular satellite. I haven't had time yet to try using the DBS sigs at 91 as a "beacon" for aiming and have confined my attempts at the FTA sigs.

I've also been relying on that borderline-useless squeal meter for alignment; I'm definitely going to take your (and others') advice and just use the signal/quality indicators from the receiver.

Bottom line? I may be like a drunk trying to get his house key into the keyhole: circling the objective, but not close enough to gain entry.

Tonight, I'll haul the goodies up the ladder again for more summer fun!

As always, thanks (and sorry for the long post).
Bob

[wejones]

Originally Posted by radiobob

......
A big challenge remains that I still haven't been able to get anything solid to verify when I am on Galaxy 11 at 91 or IA 8 at 89 (to establish once and for all what my "true south" is). This includes setting the TV and receiver on the ladder and then steering the motor to a degree east or west of indicated 0 (south), depending on satellite, then manhandling the setup, motor and dish together E-W in tiny steps, then nudging the dish elevation up and down.
..........
I've also been relying on that borderline-useless squeal meter for alignment; I'm definitely going to take your (and others') advice and just use the signal/quality indicators from the receiver.
.......

I'm curious about how much you have "nudged the dish elevation up and down" ? Ie, is it possible that you were so confident about your angle settings that you didn't go too far past where you had it set? If so, I'd suggest going a considerable amount past where you've tried.
Sorry about your not being happy with the little hand held signal meter, because I was probably the only one still recommending it's use. I have gotten frustrated with mine several times, almost to the extent of tossing it, but then I'd have success with it. In general, while looking for a satellite, in both E/W and up/dwn dimensions, even though the little meter obviously has problems, I've had much better luck with it than by using the signal meter on the receiver, mainly because of the long delay on the satellite receiver's meter. One other possibility for a signal meter, is to pick up a used analog receiver. Sometimes you can get one of those very cheap, even cheaper than the little handheld meter. What I have done, when fed up with the handheld meter, is take one of my old analog receivers out to the dish, and hook it up. My old receiver has an RCA port labled "meter" (this is common with old receivers, but not all receivers have this). I hooked up this "meter" port to a VOM. Also, many (?most?) old receivers have a feature where you can have it cycle through all the channels, click, click, click. What I did, was put the receiver in cycle mode, while moving the dish, and you get to a point where you see the reading on the VOM start to jump up and down as it goes through channels. Usually I then find the channel which gives me the highest reading, and stop it there, then adjust for the highest reading on the meter. My old receiver is a C-band receiver, but that doesn't matter, except that the channels won't be centered the same on Ku sats, however usually if you have wide DVB channels, the C-band channel will fall somewhere in that band.
Anyway, if you get to a point where you give up, you might consider getting an old analog receiver. Plus, even though there is almost nothing analog left on Ku 24/7, there are often analog feeds there, so you might even get some use out of it, particularly if it's Ku capable (if not Ku capable, you'll have to get a device to reverse video to see any video). But also, most analog receivers have a baseband video output, and you can hook this up to an FM capable shortwave reveiver to determine SR values of unknown signals. I have a Broadlogic receiver card that I can use to create a slow scan spectrum of sat signals, and have identified freqs where signals exist, and use the baseband to SW method to determine the SR. Usually this isn't necessary with a blind search, but some signals aren't found by my blind search receiver. Anyway, just trying to give more justification for picking up a used analog receiver. :-)
But back to your problem. I still cannot beleive that you can't lock on one of the G11 signals if you can lock on the ones you have, unless you are off quite a bit on your dish elevation, so I would go further than you have before, with respect to "nudging" the dish.... and don't just nudge it by hand, actually loosen the bolts and let it stay there long enough to observe a signal. If I just push on a dish, when watching the receiver level, it often doesn't register. What I do is hold the dish position as long as I can in different positions, to give the receiver time to respond. Actually, I often use a TIVO, and go outside and move the dish, and then come inside and re-run the TIVO to see what effect I had on signal.
Just a few more ideas.

[elgemcdlf]

Originally Posted by radiobob

The motor is mounted...

As always, thanks (and sorry for the long post).
Bob

Ok Bob I know how tempting it is to forget about USALS and drive manually because you have signal BUT the way the motor rotates also skews the lnbf. Unless you are perfect at true south driving with 1.2 is pointless. Well when USALS is available it is pointless.

What happens when you ask USALS to drive to 87? Is the signal there? As long as you have the correct location entries in your receiver this is where on motor rotation that 87 is. Since you were driving manually I can not say as to elevation as the farther you rotate the dish "drops" as it follows the arc. Plus rotates either clockwise or counterclockwise which skews the lnbf. If you are (which I believe) not actually correct in motor rotation for the 87 location your skew is off which could be the reason you have no PBS.

It really is this simple. Set the assembly where you believe true south is. Set your motor and dish to the settings provided here at Sadoun's site. Tell the receiver to drive using USALS to the nearest sat. Rotate your total assembly on the mount mast very slowly (did I say slowly?) in case not rotate very slowly. As much as 90 degrees to the east and the same to the west fishing for signal.

If you find nothing raise your dish elevation a degree and do the process again. The little squeeler will aid in this process as I have found without lock receivers sometimes do not show anything discerable. Once you find signal determine what it is. From there rotate your total assembly the appropriate direction the appropriate degrees. If not your true south sat your dish is to low to hit true south sat. Raise dish elevation until you hit signal.

This is not a TV antenna (well it is but not in the same sense of setup.) You can not just grab a sat and think it will pull the arc into line. Your dish does not just turn it follows an arc. Low on the ends and high in the center. Not like a normal TV antenna where a bit off produces a fuzzy picture. A hair off here and you get nothing

Let your mind release "but the book says" thinking. You have several members providing advice to guide you in a proficient manner to a successful install. Just do not mix advice. Bill has a sound plan BUT if you try to mix Bill's advice with mine you most likely will have no signal. VJ also provided guidance. Maybe even Brian did

As technical the technology actually is getting a dish aligned is really Kentucky windage as you are not exactly at the point you entered into your calculator and sats drift a bit and ...

[briand]

Originally Posted by elgemcdlf (Steve)

Maybe even Brian did

harumph!

Let me add some now, since you omitted a crucial step in your "easy set up":

It really is this simple.

* set the motor to '0' (usu. "Go To REF" in the rcvr menu)

Set the assembly where you believe true south is.
Set your motor and dish to the settings provided here at Sadoun's site.
Tell the receiver to drive using USALS to the nearest sat.

* This would, normally, be your "true south" satellite.

Rotate your total assembly on the mount mast very slowly (did I say slowly?) in case not rotate very slowly. As much as 90 degrees to the east and the same to the west fishing for signal.

.
.
.

[wejones]

Originally Posted by elgemcdlf

You have several members providing advice to guide you in a proficient manner to a successful install. Just do not mix advice. Bill has a sound plan BUT if you try to mix Bill's advice with mine you most likely will have no signal. VJ also provided guidance. Maybe even Brian did

I don't think the various sets of advise differed that much. All the advise said that the number one step is to find the true south sat, and that has yet to be done here. 99% of the time, once that has happened, the person seldom needs more advise. The main difference I see between what I've said and what you've said, is that my techniqe requires a bit more care to get the angles set properly at the start, but then is a quicker way to get the arc without needing access to satellites to both east and west, and your technique is a good technique for fine tuning, after you've found the arc, but aren't happy with the results. I think VJ's advise is a pretty good compromise.
But the bottom line is, that until you find the true south sat, you can't follow ANY of the advise. Once that sat is found it doesn't really matter who's advise he follows.

[elgemcdlf]

Originally Posted by briand

harumph!

Let me add some now, since you omitted a crucial step in your "easy set up":



* set the motor to '0' (usu. "Go To REF" in the rcvr menu)


* This would, normally, be your "true south" satellite.

.
.
.

Whoops I know my motors have buttons on them that let me just drive to 0 manually when up in the air somewhere. Letting the receiver do it is best though as that is what the receiver is going to use as referrence for every setting.

To Bill on the topic of mixing advice. I do not want him mixing concepts at the wrong spots in the process. In other words taking half of what you say on finding true south and then applying what I say on fine tuning true south, etc. All concepts presented will work just my thought that following one course from start to finish will work best to at least get an arc.

[rainman]

radiobob as steve has said you are over thinking this thing.don't lock on to the angles they are just use to get in the ball park.now with that said set your angles to start azimuth and motor to latitude and dish angle.move dish to g11 with usuals unhook your motor and hook straight to you lnb. now move dish and motor together on the pole east and west to find signal.note use a marker tape or paint mark on the pole and mount so you can return to original position. if no signal move dish elevation up or down 1 degree and move east and west again to find signal. as have been stated the elevation brackets on the dish rarely comes out to what is stated in the setups.i had to move my dish elevation 5 degrees lower than stated in the setup. and i think steve had to move is elevation 5 degrees higher. just remember setup angles is a starting point.and slow and small movements cannot be over stated.hopes this helps.

[flyfish]

Radiobob, I can't sit in the chair because I'm laughing so hard at some of your remarks in your posts. Believe me, I feel your pain. I tried for six hours straight before I finally got a signal. After several beers and snide remarks to my wife I finally got to enjoy some readings from the Quran.

Here's how I did it:

I plumbed the tripod and mast, aimed my sat at true south--173 while at 0-reference, adjusted the dish elevation according to specs--40.1, and set my motor to lat--29.6, the only one of the three that didn't give me a problem.

From there, I drug out the TV and hooked it up to the receiver and expected everything to be a cakewalk. Heck, everything up to that point had been easy. Well, well, well, the fun finally started. It was two in the afternoon, about a week and half ago, and about 101 degrees. I turned on the TV after aligning everything---and -----nothing, just the red bar that said unlocked. So, after ruling out that the receiver and sat wasn't a lemon I then proceeded to adjust the dish in .5 degree increments from 35-50 degrees while looking at the TV and holding out hope that the next .5 would hit paydirt. Ha, after six hours of doing this and by the way I started at azimuth approx 175 and did the 35-50 degree sweep at175, 174, 173 before I finally got the signal. I can now pick up about 10 or 11 sats and I think that I should be able to get a few more? Anyway, keep trying. It gets frustrating at times but I know you'll get a signal. It may be ET but you'll get a signal .

[radiobob]

Don't worry about my synthesizing reality from lots of different sources. I'm able to soak in the concepts as presented in different forms by different folks and come up with a better understanding. I've got a great mental picture of the mechanics that go into matching the arc the motor traces with the real Clarke belt arc, thanks y'all (or you guys, depending on geography).

Okay, kids, so here's the latest...

I spent about 2-1/2 hours up on the ladder with the TV and the Viewsat. I let go of my engineer-self and became as one with the dish. I left the compass and the angle finder inside and worked just with signal. With nought but a couple of Craftsman wrenches and the sweat of my brow (and the receiver remote and my sat meter), I twiddled and tweaked, rotated and peaked, tilted and squeaked and...

Nada.

Over the course of several exercises, I think I was able to peak signal for IA8 and G11 respectively, but once again was never able to demod anything from either to be completely sure. Yes, I moved the elevation all the way down to the horizon and up well past the point where the dish would be firing straight up. Yes, I was able to peak a signal (right where my previous settings were). I loosened the motor on the tower leg and swung it back and forth and again, I was able to peak a signal, and again was pretty much back to my reference marks when all was said and done.

And yes, I was using appropriate transponders for each respective satellite.

But, I'm pretty mu