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Obviously I don't have enough misery in my life so today I decided to take on the BUD again.
Rather pointless since I'm moving soon but again, I guess I needed to punish myself some more.

I had a Titanium C1PLL in place and it was pretty much mostly working. Not as well as it could but I figured that was a result of not having it aligned properly.

Some months ago I bought a pair of C2wPLLs but they have just sat gathering dust after I found out about moving.

Today I decided to go put one on my 10' BUD. It's an ODOM brand. That's all I know about it..

In the past I've never once taken to using any scientific or mathematical methods of aligning it, not even a little. I would just spend weeks futzing with it until I got lucky and hit something then I would just go full hands off and leave it parked on one satellite for months or years.

What really set me off on it again was that all of a sudden MeTV vanished for no good reason. So I figured I might as well go change the LNBF and see if I could get all precise like with it this time.

So, I took the LNBF and using a straightedge I drew a line down the outside of it that is perfectly aligned with it's ZERO mark.

Then I took a string and some clamps and I pulled a string line from the edges at the top and bottom and laid the string over the LNBF holder so that it was aligned perfectly with the center line of the dish and in prefect alignment with the polar mount.

Then I climbed the ladder and made a mark on the holder where the string was laying. If the dish were stood on it's edge perfectly vertical the mark I made would be at the exact top.

So then I put the new LNBF in the mount and lined it up with the new mark I made. This would put the LNBF so it's zero mark is perfectly aligned with the centerline of the dish.

I swung the dish back up and much to my dismay, nothing.. No signal at all.

Then I thought it might be the F/D (I don't fully understand what it even means and I certainly can't do the math) so I went the route of trying random settings, which got me nowhere at all.

Finally I decided to look up something about it and I read that you tie a string across the dish and measure the depth. I did that and it came out to 21 inches deep. I found a calculator for dishes and I put in the 10 foot and the 21 inch depth and it told me that the F/D should be .357 (I found this out after I already gave up for the night)

What makes this really difficult is that the dish is so big that I can not reach the LNBF without tipping it all the way over and then I have to climb up on a ladder. When it's tipped into the proper position for viewing, I can't reach anything even when I'm on a ladder. What I need is some sort of platform that I can extend into the dish that I can walk out on, mess with stuff then retract it back out of the way. But that's not likely to happen.

Since I have to tip it back and forth it's really hard to work on and I spend a great deal of time walking back and forth into the house to operate the motor.

Oh, also, I am reasonably confident that I have the elevation and declination set pretty close to what it should be, I expended a great deal of effort and angst over figuring that out much earlier this year. I also found a way to ensure that I have the azimuth set dead on as well.

What I'm not real sure about is should I have the LNBF aligned perfectly with the centerline of the dish?
Doesn't it like, change the skew as the dish tips, like a KU USALS does? I know on them you set the LNB to zero skew and the dish tips to change it.

Or am I completely missing something here? I'm thinking of going out to try changing the F/D now that I found a little calculator for it. I'm thinking that I had it wrong today. Obviously something was wrong as I could not find a signal at all after changing the LNBF.