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Rather than waste a lot of you guy's time with lots of stupid questions I did a lot of reading, a lot of guessing and a lot of finger crossing.

Well over a year ago I obtained a ku motor (thank you Dad!) and for all this time it languished in its box, gathering dust, never once used.

A few weeks ago I got a burr under my saddle and decided that by golly, I was going to make it work!

I sat and looked at it for weeks. The darn motor tube is larger than standard and NONE of my dishes are standard ku dishes such as the type sold for motor mounting. They are old Primestar and Directway dishes. I can thank my ex husband for scrounging them out of whatever trash piles he found them in, for whatever reason he wanted them. I'm just glad he left them behind..

Anyway.. So the non-standard motor just would not mate up to the non-standard dishes I have. Grrrrrrr........

So I sat and looked at things, time and time again, trying to figure out some way, any way that I could put the motor onto ANY dish that I have here.

Then I took that digital measuring tool Dad gave me and went around the garage, house and yard measuring EVERYTHING.

I knew ALL the dishes I have fit on a fence post, like for gates and corners. I think they are about 2 1/2" around, more or less. The motor tube was too small for that but not by much.

One of the things that was a problem was that at the bottom of the motor tube there was this large lip all around that was far too large to fit into anything. Not cool..

So I decided that had to go. I took a hacksaw and sawed that flippin lip off!

Then back to measuring everything again. I was sitting on the deck and looked over at a pile of fence tubes I had sawn up for making wind chimes (I make gianormously wicked wind chimes for a hobby) and picked up a short piece and looked at it. Hmmm.. No way I thought.. So I had the motor sitting there and the piece of tube in hand and one of the little Primestar dishes sitting there and it dawned on me... I slipped the tube into the Primestar dish. It fit of course. Then I took it out and picked up the motor and slid it over the motor tube. It fit! Snugly at that! NO WAY!! This was it! This was my magic moment! I had my adapter! WOO HOO!!

The tube was even the right length! I didn't have to cut it any more, it was a left over and I was so happy that I could make use of it rather than it go to waste..

So I drilled a hole through the adapter and into the motor tube and put a screw through them both so that it can not spin, twist or slip off.


I spent a few days reading the manual trying to understand how to adjust the tipping stuff but it wasn't sinking in at all. Not to mention, the manual was assuming I was using a standard dish that was designed for motors. This one was not. I had taken it's pole mounting on the back and flipped it upside down as many had mentioned in threads here.

I took the motor and dish out to the pole and bolted the dish to the pole then I put the dish onto the motor. That's when I realized that I had the motor totally tilted waaaaaay wrong. Back inside for more reading... Finally it began to dawn on me so I went out and took it all apart and changed the tilt again. I ended up tilting the motor to my latitude or longitude, it's 30. I can not remember which is what that lat. long. stuff mixes me up 100% of the time. Anyway, which ever one it is, I set it to that on the motor tilt. The motor came from the factory set at zero.

One of the things I read here was that you should try to us a satellite as close to true south as possible for your alignments. Dishpointer.com tells me that Galaxy 3C at 95 is very close to true south for me. So I took my new little meter and found that satellite without operating the motor. All I did was turn the dish east and west then adjusted the tilt on the dish itself until I found the satellite. From there I tightened it down and called it good. The next day I went out and manually tried to get a better signal and stumbled upon the "wild feeds" on 91 Galaxy 17.

I hooked the lnb into my 8 way switch and left the motor disconnected. For a week or so I just played with it scanning each afternoon for news feeds, watching reports dig out wedgies and smoke cigarettes between takes.

So last night I decided it was time to try and get it right.

I took the wires off from the 8 way and removed it from the main system then hooked it to a spare wire and put it on the Coolsat 6000.

I went into the Coolsat setup screen and told it that I have a USALS motor. It asked for my location in long. and lat. I looked that up and entered it. Then I went to blind scan and told it to scan in the satellite 97 Galaxy 19. It turned on the motor and moved the dish. And nothing came in. At this point I was ~assuming~ everything. I was assuming that the system was intelligent and it knew where to move the dish to without me having to program it. Oh yeah?? Cool!

So I assumed that it had moved the dish to point at 97 but that I didn't have it on the pole the right way. I went out and put the dish on the little meter, loosened it up and turned it until I got a signal. I adjusted it back and forth and adjusted the dish tilt until I got as good a signal as I could. I took the meter off, put the wires back and went inside and started playing with the Coolsat. I scanned and found some channels. I moved to a new satellite and scanned and found channels there. I spent a few hours at it and my results were not exactly great. But I kept at it and went back outside and tried adjusting a few more times until about 5am I hit gold and was finding all the channels on all the satellites.

So now I have a fully operational ku motor. But, it's on the Coolsat and I don't want it there. I want it on the system with all the other dishes. That's where the real challenge will come in to place. I have no idea how I will make this increasingly complicated system all play nice..

Oh, and the little 6 foot dish. I found an OLD C-band tuner that turned up last year and I hooked the motor wires from that dish to that old tuner. The tuner itself is old and crummy and the remote is broken but it has two push buttons on the front. When you push them, even a tiny, brief punch, the dish moves a LOT. Pretty imprecise if you ask me. But I got lucky.
That 6 foot dish is on the 8 way switch for the PC so I changed channels to one of the LeSEA channels then used the buttons on that old tuner to bump the dish back and forth until I landed on the right satellite at 99 Galaxy 16. I got exceptionally lucky and with a few bumps I was able to get those channels in loud and clear. And that's where that dish will sit. No need to move it, it works really, really well right there. And on those channels they run some oldies I like, like Green Acres and such.. As Charlie would say, "WINNING!"

I also did some manual editing on transponders for 87 AMC 3 since the PC can't do blind scans and no other piece of equipment I have can tune in S2 channels. There is no way for me to blind scan S2 channels at all. So I ~must know~ where they are to begin with.

I did that and then rescanned 87 and I found a ton more S2 channels. Most of them are not listed either here on The List or on Lyngsat. The stuff on Lyngsat appears to be way out of date. Oh well..

So now I have like almost 75 S2 channels on 87. They are almost all RTV or TUFF but they seem to be small town low power stations around the country. And many of them run stuff different from the national schedule. And that is AWESOME! If I miss something I can usually find it hours later or find things that no longer run on the national feed! I love it!

The S2 channels are really touchy though so I need to get out there and fine tune the big dish but that's a low priority. I can usually compensate by bumping the dish around a little with the Gbox remote control. Over all the BIG 10 foot dish is working great and I'm getting lots of awesome channels on it!

And for ALL of this, I thank you guys. There is no way in the world I could have gotten any of this working without your knowledge and help. THANK YOU......


So my next step to completing my set up is taking the ku motorized dish and adding it into the pc system, somehow. The Coolsat is just a testing tool and I don't want to use it as it won't get audio on most channels, won't get HD, won't get S2 and you can't record at all with it or schedule channel changes. Eh... But it is a handy testing tool...

In the end I want ALL the dishes on the pc and the pc controlling them all. I'm close, I'm real close to getting that done. I just don't know how to do it. I don't know how to make the ku motor play nice with the 8 way switch and the Gbox too. I have a general idea of how it should work, I just don't know what I have to do to make it happen.

But I'll get it. I'll figure it out. I'll keep reading and I'll try not to be a pest and ask stupid questions and waste people's time. It takes me a looooong time to get things done but I'm learning..



P.S. in the pictures the pole and stuff looks crooked but it's not. I just tilted the camera because I was slapping mosquitoes when I trying to take pics..