Got my System: Follow up questions
Ok... so I had no problem pointing my Dway dish at various satellites on it's fixed mount, but I went to "motorize" the system yesterday, and boy did I have trouble.
Mainly, the source of the trouble is that I am fabricating my own hybrid mount. I can't use the DWAY mount because it is just simply too big, and is oriented towards a mounting pole being pointed "UP", not down like the motor arm. I toyed with the idea of adapting it, but it was rather heavy, so I decided not to.
So... I adapted some parts off an old terk D* dish, and mounted it onto the back of the DWAY dish and started pointing.
Problem 1: Couldn't get enough elevation. Being in Texas, you gotta point way up! So, my hybrid mount couldn't get me high enough, so back to home depot for more parts, and rebuilt the mount.
Now: I could point my new mount nearly straight up at the sky, but I could still not get the signal in. Finally figured it out when I set the old DWAY mount on top of the pole for perspective... it was the angle of the mounting plate (IE, the top was too high, but the bottom too low). The part I used from the Terk was somewhat curved to fit directly to the back of a curved dish, and that threw the angle of the dish off...
So, I put some shims under the top part of the plate... and bang, signal came right in.
I quit for the day... Mind you, this was after working on it for 8-10 hours in the yard yesterday. Sunburned as all get out.
Today I need to actually hook up the coaxes to the motor and cross my fingers...
Here's my question before I even bother with it.
The instructions for the motor have you set the elevation of the motor, and then also set the elevation of your dish. In essence, I have a "fixed" elevation on my homebrew dish mount, and used the elevation adjustment on the motor bracket to lock in the signal on my true south satellite.
Do you think that not having my motor bracket set to the right elevelation will cause problems in finding the other satellites, or (as I am crossing my fingers), that as long as I have a good signal to my reference satellite, everything else will work fine?