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Hello,

I recently installed a 10' mesh Channel Master antenna at my residence in Ottawa, Canada (45N, 76W) and would like to tap into the experience base here around performance tuning before I start trimming branches and looking for a 15' dish.

After installing the dish on a 10' pole, I aligned the polar axis and declination, then installed and rotated the LNBF for maximum S/N ratio using my First Strike FS1 signal meter. Following this, I aligned the dish using ths push, pull, and rotate method to track true south and implement the correct polar axis, declination, and heading.

I then installed the GBox (from Sadoun) connected to my AzBox programming in all of the birds from 135W to 87W. After signal testing, and many hours of verification, the dish tracks the arc nicely.

After setting up the receiver system, I was able to scan in signals on most of the birds, although the main issue I am seeing is a picture stability issue. Even on satellites like 91W where I get 85% - 90% quality, the signal breaks apart every 5 or 10 seconds.

Strangely enough, on lower birds like 135W where the signal has 10dB less S/N, I see the same behaviour. In both cases, the signal breaks up every 5-10 seconds while the signal on the FS1 stays relatively constant.

I don't know if this is a gain or spurious noise issue. There seems to be enough signal on the higher birds and quality is much higher than I ever saw on my Ku setup. On the Ku side, I could watch a signal reliably at 40% quality while at 80% quality on the C band with the same encoding mechanism, I see the breakups mentioned before.

This issue is prevalent on my AzBox, as well as the the DSR-920 where the signal breaks up consistently on the birds at 133, 125, and 99W. On the DSR-920, the signal strength remains constant while the quality number dips every few seconds from 99 to 0 and back.

My thoughts are that the problem could be related to spurious noise. I tried two LNBF's: The DSC621 and the DMX741 - both displaying similar behaviour.

Here are my questions:

• Is there a known AzBox sensitivity, or error correction issue?
• What sort of performance enhancement could I get with a more heavy duty feedhorn/lnb setup?
• Is there something obvious I can try to improve the performance?

One more observarion: The vertical transponders on many of the western arc satellites (133, 135) are consistently stronger than horizontal in S/N (3-5 dB better noise figures).

Thanks for any insights.

Brian