4DTV Finding Sats

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dunnsept

SatelliteGuys Pro
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Nov 10, 2008
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Central Meechigan
One thing I played with last night in setting up new sats that worked pretty well so I thought I'd post it here.
Set your limits on the 4dtv. Currently mine are something like 4100 to 5400 (give or take).
Find G1, let it download channel maps, at least on mine, it put G1 at 5000.
Go to the web and get a sat chart and a channel listing.
G1 is at 133°.
Next is C4 at 135°. C4 has some analog FTA on it, so click in the menu that you want to program C4 next, set the tuner to TP9 which is QVC. start moving your dish until you find that channel. Peak the dish, peak skew and save C4.
Record the dish position.
Either do one more sat to the west or go one sat to the east of G1.
C3 at 131° has C-Span on 11, so that's a good one to target. Peak the dish & skew and save C3, record the dish position.

I don't know exactly what those position numbers mean on the receiver, BUT what you will find now that you have dish location information for 3 sats across the arc described by YOUR dish.
Each of those sats is 2° apart and you will have dish position information something like
G1: 5000
C4: 5025
C3: 4972
The thing to notice here is that (at least on my dish) the sats that are 2° apart require about 25 to 30 "counts" of dish movement to tune them. So now, let's say you have GB programmed and you want to add T4. GB is at 91° and T4 is at 89°, so start at the position for GB, move the dish so the count is lower by about 25 to 30 (or whatever YOUR system gives you) and you should be really close to the sat's position, now you can start bumping the dish east & west to try to pinpoint the location. Try both analog and digital channels as sometimes when I was setting up the sats, I had nothing on analog, but on digital I could see the "quality" rating go up even though "signal" never changed from 100.
Then you can see the DC light come on when the signal is "good enough" for a lock. Once I had that, at least I could see the "you don't have a subscription to XYZ" and then I knew I had the right sat based on the channel listing.

In summary, what this allows you to do is figure out how many dish movment "counts" your system takes to move the dish 2° across the arc. Since most of these sats are 2° apart, that gets you really close to the sat's location, instead of just blindly scanning back-n-forth across a huge range trying to find the sat by luck.

If anybody has any corrections, please let me know.

HTH
Paul...
 
I find it easier using the easy sat locator, the 4dtv will find every sat on it's own mostly up until Intelsat-9 (P9). After that I use the dvb receivers signal meter to tune in the other birds.
 
I find it easier using the easy sat locator, the 4dtv will find every sat on it's own mostly up until Intelsat-9 (P9). After that I use the dvb receivers signal meter to tune in the other birds.

hmm.. I wonder if there's something wrong with mine. it was way off on every sat. I would tell it to go to, say T4, and you could see the thing jumping all over the place (in the sat list), when it finally stopped it was no where near that sat. I had to adjust every one of them manually
 
To use the easy sat locator you must do a master reset, set your limits and dish setting for your location, then program 3-5 satellites across the arc, then go back to g1 (good place to do the reset it will always be 5000) go to channel 3 turn the unit off for about half hour, turn it on and you should only have to select the sats in your list and the 4dtv will have them calculated properly, sometimes a small bumping should get them in perfect as they mite be a few clicks off but still able to lock the feeds.
 
that's how the unit was when I got it. And the procedure I followed.. at first I was going "yea, this is easy" but it was only on target for 4 that I programmed manually. it was off for every other one.
even with more and more programmed, it has never been right when I try to add a satellite.
oh well, it's done now
 
On my 922 I ended up using the "count" method like dunnsept did. According to the manual after entering a few locations the unit will (might) find the other satellite locations. The ones the 922 calculated were always too far off to just fine tune in with a click or two!
 
Could be your settings are incorrect for your location, I do a reset for the heck of it 2-3 times a year, out of over 20 or more time the easy sat locator failed maybe 3 times, when it fails everything is wrong so I set it up anyway or just do another reset and it works fine.

I never read the instructions but I do know it will not work if you do not set 3-5 birds across the arc, like 2 on the east one in the middle and 2 on the west.
 
On my 920, after the master reset, I just found 2: G1 and C4. Then the unit calculated the positions for all the other birds...
"move the dish to ****"
and it was only off a couple clicks, but close enough to find them!:D
 
I went last night to play with this some more. I thought I would add another sat as a sort of test.
I currently have G0, G5, G9, C3, G1, C4 programmed and peaked (amongst others).. get great signals from them.. So I thought I would add W7. W7 is only 2° from C4.
(dont remember the exact numbers but this is more for illustration anyway)
C4 is at about 5170 which would put W7 close to 5195 on my system. When I went to add the sat, it said "ok, move dish to 4930" for W7, which really puts it over by like W5. WAY OFF. (and yes, I have things set properly re: linear west/east etc)
But if I take the starting point for C4 and just add 25 "counts" to dish position, that gets me really close.. close enough that I can find it fairly easily.

in the big picture, I guess it doesn't matter much. for those where the receiver works like it should finding the sats, great..for those of us where it doesn't work, we know how to get around it, and now it's documented here for posterity :D
 
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