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wvman said:

I hit the jackpot over the weekend. I located 2 10 foot wire mesh dishes, one Perfect 10, one Unimesh in excellent condition free to get them out of there. I originally installed the Perfect 10 when I was in business. It had a little hail dimples, but those are easy enough to repair. I would have taken one of them yesterday, but it had a hornet's nest on it the size of a basketball. I plan on installing these two dishes at my house and lock them on different satellites.

With the 7 1/2 foot and these, I am going to make a dish farm or sorts and I need a little advice. I have two receivers in the house and I need to know how to get all three dishes tied together with both polarities on all three dishes. I need to know how many switches I'll need, and if I'll need a power inserter and how to wire them so I'll have programming from all three dishes at each receiver.

I was thinking of locking one ten footer on Galaxy 16, the other on SES-1 and the 7 1/2 footer on Galaxy 19. I have a bit of a signal problem on SES-1 with Movies, Decades, H&I and MeTV. I hope setting them this way will eliminate the problems with these channels and make it easier to switch channels.

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ancient said:

I don't know what is wrong with SES-1 but I am having the same issues even using a 10 foot dish. Also I will say that if I were you I'd consider using the 10 footer for Galaxy 19 and the 7½ footer on Galaxy 16. If you aim the smaller one properly you should have no problems with most of the signals there, except maybe the one from Missouri which seems to be having a lot of issues lately. But if you are trying to get the high bandwidth signal on Galaxy 19 (you probably know the one I mean; the 4:2:2 one that most receivers won't play in real time) or especially that elusive 16APSK one, then you need every little bit of signal strength you can get.

With three or more dishes I think I'd consider setting up a satellite backend system using TVHeadEnd and a couple of tuner cards (at least a quad input one). Better if you had two such cards so you could have six or more inputs and dual output LNB's on all your dishes, then you could record from up to two different transponders (regardless of polarity) on each satellite at the same time, without ever having to switch inputs. And you can play the live streams or recordings on any device connected to your local network that can run Kodi or VLC, with the caveat that some of the lower-powered devices (like a Raspberry Pi or most Android-based devices) may not have enough power to play those high-bandwidth streams or recordings smoothly. But the initial investment on that can be a bit costly and also there's quite a bit to learn before you will have it running smoothly. On the other hand, receivers are cheap and getting cheaper, so if you plan to do all your viewing in a single location those are the least costly option, but many of them may not be able to play live TV or recordings from those high bandwidth transponders. You could have a receiver for each dish and then use a HDMI selector switch (assuming you don't have enough HDMI inputs on your TV) to switch between them.

I think TVHeadEnd might become a lot more usable for us if they ever actually get around to releasing version 4.2, but something keeps delaying it. I know the 4.0 version will not scan in channels from some of the newer TBS cards; don't know if 4.2 will fix that or not.

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migold said:

It sounds like you want to do what I have done. I have one 8 ft stationary on 99W and 105W [Dual C-band LNBFs]; one 10 ft moveable on 97W and 103W [Dual C-band LNBFs]; and one 90cm Ku moveable usually aimed at 125W. I have attached the connection diagram.
Satellite_System Hookup_2016.pdf
This system has been put together slowly over the past few years. It uses 4X4 switches and 4x1 DiSeqC switches. If you are in southern WV, you are probably not far from my location.

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Titanium said:

The image size or squishing is the aspect ratio setting on the receiver and/or the TV. Change the aspect ratio setting to either auto or a fixed aspect ratio.

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ancient said:

I don't know what is wrong with SES-1 but I am having the same issues even using a 10 foot dish. Also I will say that if I were you I'd consider using the 10 footer for Galaxy 19 and the 7½ footer on Galaxy 16. If you aim the smaller one properly you should have no problems with most of the signals there, except maybe the one from Missouri which seems to be having a lot of issues lately. But if you are trying to get the high bandwidth signal on Galaxy 19 (you probably know the one I mean; the 4:2:2 one that most receivers won't play in real time) or especially that elusive 16APSK one, then you need every little bit of signal strength you can get.

With three or more dishes I think I'd consider setting up a satellite backend system using TVHeadEnd and a couple of tuner cards (at least a quad input one). Better if you had two such cards so you could have six or more inputs and dual output LNB's on all your dishes, then you could record from up to two different transponders (regardless of polarity) on each satellite at the same time, without ever having to switch inputs. And you can play the live streams or recordings on any device connected to your local network that can run Kodi or VLC, with the caveat that some of the lower-powered devices (like a Raspberry Pi or most Android-based devices) may not have enough power to play those high-bandwidth streams or recordings smoothly. But the initial investment on that can be a bit costly and also there's quite a bit to learn before you will have it running smoothly. On the other hand, receivers are cheap and getting cheaper, so if you plan to do all your viewing in a single location those are the least costly option, but many of them may not be able to play live TV or recordings from those high bandwidth transponders. You could have a receiver for each dish and then use a HDMI selector switch (assuming you don't have enough HDMI inputs on your TV) to switch between them.

I think TVHeadEnd might become a lot more usable for us if they ever actually get around to releasing version 4.2, but something keeps delaying it. I know the 4.0 version will not scan in channels from some of the newer TBS cards; don't know if 4.2 will fix that or not.

Click to expand...