Hi Francais,
I'll try that next time I'm down there - thanks for the knowledge. When I play with this lot at home I never have a problem sat in the back yard it picks up the whole free stuff and hundreds of foreign stuff.
The app I use gives me the elevation etc and it is spot on at home so I trusted it to do the same in the lower latitudes. The motor intrigued me by the way they get it to follow the arc and keep the the skew on target without any fiddling - just to set the LNB to zero and it tracks the arc perfectly. Clearly I don't know enough yet. A light on the motor illuminates at each high signal as it passes.
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Having an app to locate the satellite is fine, but how you apply that so it aligns the dish to the satellite is another matter, advanced systems use a gps system that controls the Dish motor for both East to West or vice versa and elevation.
DiSEqC motors are in my mind a compromise, although fine in strong signal locations.
My reasoning is that with a DiSEqC motor, you do not have a Declination setting, as such, the actual arc that that is tracked flattens out near the top, and the Declination setting found on a true Polar Mount helps compensate for this.
Also unless you are using a seperate feed, the the feed from the LNB will suffer signal loss as it passes through the motor, again fine in strong signal situations, but any loss of signal no matter how small is bad for out f footprint reception.
And Skew, well back in the day, all motorised systems had adjustable Skew, either by Magnetic Polariser or Mechanical Polarotor.
The reason for having adjustable Skew, is due to the fact that as the Dish tracks the arc, the angle of Skew comming into the Feed Horn on the Dish, is not proportional to the geostationary position of the satellite.
In fact Skew can vary per Transponder on the same satellite, an extreme example is Horizontal and Vertical, as the Skew can be effected by frequency, again these small variances are less noticeable when there is an abundance of signal.
In fact satellite reception in it's purist form, would be to have a none Universal LNB for recieving a Single Polarity through a dedicated Feed Horn.
In fact back in the day all the French Analogue FTA channels used to be transmitted in the one Polarity, and of course in SECAM not PAL, from Telcom 2B at 5Deg West.
Of course only about 6 Channels, those were the days!
When I watch those auto things on the motorhomes they appear to do incremental scans e/w and then alter the elevation on each scan, I don't see the LNB make any movement for skew so how can they pick up the channels as easy as they do even with a smaller dish? Another guy on the site was having the same difficulty as me with different receivers and he was getting some channels I could not and visa versa. We were both dumb struck with ease this particular one picked up all these channels.
A lot of MotorHome owners find that there 85cm Oyster systems often don't get Astra2 Freesat channels whilst down on the Cote d Azur.
But they may well get say Sky News from Astra2 of course.
There was a lot of complaints about the automatic systems like the Oyster Dome systems as fitted to many motorhomes, no fault of the system, as the problem was brought about by the Astra2 satellite changes back in 2014.
In fact Oyster did have a disclaimer on there website, let's face it if you had paid £5000 or more so that you can watch Freesat whilst in Cannes or Benidorm etc then find out you can't when you get there you would be a little annoyed.
Personally I don't see it as a problem, if you can't get Astra2 you will always be able to get Astra1 or HotBird etc, handy for the Sky and CNN News but not much else in English of course.
Thankfully there is help on the horizon, no pun intended, SpaceX plan to launch 4000 satellites, that will cover the Earth with free Internet TX/RX than can be picked up with a flat 10" pizza box shape antenna anywhere.
Can't wait for that to happen, Freesat in Frejus from a 25cm antenna, happy days ahead me thinks!
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Anyway in the meantime, if my six numbers come up, I will be buying a MotorHome c/w Oyster system, although it will have to be a 1.2m bespoke model !
Anyway back in the real world, check out the YouTube videos on the Oyster systems with auto Skew.
There is a small motor built into the LNB holder, which rotates the LNB in order to optimise Skew, very clever auto seeking system, but like any satellite system it still needs a clear line of sight to the Bird.
I have seen plenty of MotorHome and caravan folk with these expensive systems, not being able to use them due to tree shade, whilst my cheapo system, can and has been placed of pitch in order to get clear line of sight.
I would need those 6 numbers before I would invest £65,000 in a motorhome to stand in the yard for 90% of the year even with a fancy Oyster system. Speaking about that, when I was setting my Huge dish up and tweeking it a Swiss couple came over dragged me across to their van, on the floor was what looked like a small Darleck and it did not open up to any thing but they said it can pick up anything in Europe. They could move it around for best clear view - even on the roof of the van. When I got home I checked out something like that and they were priced at about £2000. Again if got the six numbers I would go back to sailing and buy a nice cruiser based in the Carmarge
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Yep, it's great how the Swiss, French, Germans etc can enjoy portable satellite with a small antenna anywhere in Europe, whilst us Brits get landid with a stupid system that relies on a Spot Beam focused onto the UK.
All they had to do, was Soft Encrypt Freesat, job done.
Back in the day a Sky mini dish worked fine all over France, not now though, so in effect we have gone backwards!
The fact that you can still recieve Freesat all over France, just goes to prove what a waste of time it was adopting a Spot Beam, if the intention was to restrict content to UK only.
There are probably more folk now, watching Freesat outside of UK than there was before, and most of them will not be UK Nationals.
Francais, I see from your post that you have a SCT 1.2m Prime Focus Reference dish. I've been trying to find someone with one of these for some time. I also have one of the dishes but I've lost the feed arms. I've been looking for replacement feed arms but can't find any anywhere. Is there any way you could send me the exact dimensions of one of your feed arms together with some photos?
You probably have in your hands what is the best manufactured satellite dish's ever made.
Only closely matched by one made from Precision, who almost exclusively supply to the milatary, although I suspect you may know all about that.
Anyway no photos as I am technically challenged in that department when it comes to this forum.
Feed Arms Length. = 452mm or 17 3/4" for Church of England.
Feed Arms Diameter = 10mm with 5mm internal thread either end.
I guess you still have the boss to which the feed horn clamps onto, another nice piece of engineering to take the 3 Feed Arms.
If you have, you will know that the dish is only designed for a 23mm feed horn, not a problem as you can get Universal LNB's with a 23mm collar, designed for a PFA and not Offset.
Good luck.
Edit = correct myself, as that dish could also be fitted with a C Band LNB, using an adapter, so I guess any type feed horn could be fitted, either 23mm or the more modern style 40mm, just a case of having the relevant adapter.
Post last edited on 23/03/2019 10:46:06
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A day of all things motorhome and campervan. The show is held both in the main indoor arena and across the grounds. Catering, hot drinks and food options are available. Easy access to the site and free parking included. Win one of five pairs of day tickets
Topic: Satellite interesting discovery
via mobile 23/3/2019 at 9:16am
