Another WEIRD problem.

[B.J.]

Just one day after having the weird coax failure on my BUD, I decided to go on to my next project, which was to move my 90CM Fortec / SG2100 up to the roof of my garage, where it will have a better view of the sky. I had already installed the pipe I was going to mount it on, so I figured, that I'd just detach the motor from the pole in the ground, and put it on the pole on the roof, then turn the whole thing on the pole until the channel I had been watching popped in. Simple. Yeah... right.
Well, I moved the motor/dish assembly up onto the roof as planned, but I had a really hard time finding any sat. After fighting with the thing for about 3 hours, I finally found a couple sats in the tuning page of my receiver, but when I switched back to the TV page to view the channel, I lost lock. This was sort of why I was having problems finding lock, because the signal seemed to be coming and going. But THEN, I lost ALL signal, not only on the Fortec dish, but also on my fixed Primestar dish, which is fed through the same diseqC switch. Signal was ZERO, not even any baseline noise signal. Normally this happens when my diseqC switch dies, so I put in another switch. Same thing. Put in yet another switch. Same thing. Then I bypassed the switch altogether. Same thing, zero signal. THEN, I bypassed the SG2100 motor..... SIGNAL. So somehow the motor had stopped passing through the signal. I started to pull off the short coax that goes from the motor to the diseqC switch, and I noticed that the connector on the motor was loose. FOOEY, I thought.

This had happened to me once before, and is apparently a well known problem with the SG2100. Before, I was able to take the thing apart, and found that all I needed to do was unscrew the threaded part of the connector, back off the nut, then screw it in tightly, then tighten up the nut, that I could fix the problem, because there was really no wire to break off in there, it was just a contact connection. So I went out this morning in the rain, up on the roof with an umbrella, took the dish off the motor, and the motor off the pole, brought it inside, took it apart, fixed the connection, back out in the rain. Put the motor/dish back up. Came inside. ZERO signal!@$%#^@*)@*
I thought FOOEY, I should have checked to make sure it worked before I put it back. So back up the ladder in the rain. Dish off motor, motor off pole, brought it inside. Took it apart. Checked conductivity... checked out ok ????? Connected an 18V power source (Channel Master Meter), and the motor lit up, and the power was getting through to the LNB connector. So I hooked it up inside, receiver to the motor, and the LNB connection of the motor to the LNB on my fixed Primestar.
When I touched the center conductor of the coax to the LNB connector, I instantly got a lock on the receiver, however when I pushed the coax completely in, so that the ground made contact, then I LOST lock. No S/Q. HOWEVER, when I put on another coax to the LNB connector, and then connected the other end of THAT coax to the coax to the LNB via a barrel connector, THEN, I got a good lock, and I could make the motor move from position to position via the receiver while it was sitting on my lap.
It seems clear that I have a loose connection somewhere, but now that it's working, I can wiggle every connection and never lose signal. Everything seems solid.
I hate to have to move that thing back up on the roof, and find that it doesn't work again, but the darn thing works fine here in the house. This is really confusing.

Also, in the process of taking this motor apart several times, I realized that I think I have been completely wrong about how this darn motor works, and am confused about some other things relating to the motor, but I'll make a separate post about that. Right now, I'm just trying to figure out where the intermittant connection is on this motor. \

 

[AcWxRadar]

B.J.

Not sure of this, but I read at one time, long while ago, that if your center conductor was too long, it would protrude into the motor connector and beyond it and short out against something internal within the motor and kill the signal.

Since it has been a long time, I don't recall all the specifics, but could this be a possible scenario here?

RADAR

 

[B.J.]

B.J.

Not sure of this, but I read at one time, long while ago, that if your center conductor was too long, it would protrude into the motor connector and beyond it and short out against something internal within the motor and kill the signal.

Since it has been a long time, I don't recall all the specifics, but could this be a possible scenario here?

RADAR

I'm not sure. It might be possible. The threaded part of the connector comes completely off and is sort of like a barrel connector, and it seems to have a conductor inside which I thought was fixed, and the end of the inside conductor pushes against a movable prong in the fixed portion of the connector. It's possible that if the inside conductor moves at all, that it could push PAST the prong it's supposed to contact. I sort of had this problem the first time I "FIXED" the connector, because I bent the prong part in the fixed part, trying to make it line up better to go "into" the threaded part, but I ended up making it not line up properly. So maybe it's not quite lined up right, and if the conductor inside the threaded part moves at all, it might lose contact? It does seem like it's dependent upon which coax is connected to it, so I guess that makes as much sense as anything. Still a bit strange.
I intend to buy a new motor, but I'm trying to get this one back up temporarily while trying to decide which new one to buy.

 

[Cadsulfide]

You can get standard panel mount F connectors at Digikey, MCM, etc and replace the connectors on the motor assembly. A little soldering and that should fix your problem.

 

[AcWxRadar]

B.J.

It seems, by all your desciptions, that it is related to either your cable end connectors or the F-connectorsw on the motor itself. My first line of defense and troubleshooting tactic would be to replace the short cable between the LNBF and the motor and then cut off several inches to a foot of the cable between the motor and the receiver (at the motor end of that cable) and atttach a new connector end. This would obviously be the simplest (and least expensive) task to rule out any trouble in the cabling.

Then, like Cadsulfide mentioned, you could replace the F-connector on the motor fairly easily, too.

One of the items that I put on my hit list (at work or in my hobbies at home) when I move any equipment around that has been in place for a long time, is to ensure that all the wiring or cabling is refreshed. Especially anything that is outdoors and in the elements. Just disturbing an old connection can create trouble with signals, expreslly with high frequency signals.

Also, don't forget to investigate your grounding circuit. Since you lose your signal when the cable connector ground makes contact with the outer connector of the motor's F-connector, that could be a sign, too.

I am just tossing out ideas as I think of them, it could be so simple, but still ellusive to isolate.

Now you have me very interested and I wish I could be there to work with you to toubleshoot it. I love doing that, especially strange and intermittent problems. They are the hardest to isolate, but it makes you feel good when you figure it out!

RADAR

 

[turbosat]

You have RAIN? Sorry, been so long I forget what it is to work on anything in rain.
Hope you figure it out, I hate problems like that.

 

[B.J.]

Re rain, last few years here have been very wet. I took an umbrella up on the roof with me, and put the handle in the top of the mast that the dish is mounted on. Worked pertty well, until some wind just lifted the umbrella off, very gently. I didn't even notice it leaving. I guess wind came up the slope of the roof, and picked it up from below.

Well, I put the motor back up on the roof. Fiddled with the connections a bit to make sure I was getting signal through the motor, then re-connected my diseqC switch. ------ ZERO SIGNAL. Bypassed the switch good strong signal.
I have about 6 different diseqC switches and a 22 KHz switch. I tried 5 of the 6 diseqC switches. One gave the same signal on all 4 ports, but the other ones were completely dead. No big surprise, as ALL of these switches have died at one time or another, but keep coming back to life, but this time they seem to be ALL dead.
I then tried the 22KHz switch. This got even weirder than before. The darn thing started giving a high pitched mechanical sounding whine, kind of like a mechanical switch being switched on and off very fast (like at 22KHz), but I came inside, and the receiver (Diamond 9000) was giving off the same whine sound. This was kind of creapy so I took off the 22khz switch before I even gave it a serious try. The whine was whether 22KHz was on or off, and diseqC was off. I SHOULD have tried bypassing the motor to see if the motor was doing this, but I didn't want to disturb the cables on the motor, which seemed to be in a position where they worked.
Anyway, I couldn't get ANY of my collection of possibly defective switches to work. I'm starting to think that the long coax run is maybe too much for the switch, partly because of one thing I noticed when I first tried the one switch that gave the same signal on all 4 ports. THAT switch was giving AMC21 from my fixed dish, which was on port 4, on all 4 ports, however I couldn't tune in anything vertical when going through the switch. On Horizontal, I was locking the LPB S2 signal nice and strong. So I think something is behaving unusual here voltage wise. Strange to get the 18V polarity, but not the 13V polarity.

I finally gave up, and just bypassed the switch, so I have to climb up on the ladder, and manually switch between LNBFs, which is a pain. But at least I got the thing tracking the arc, from AMC6 over to Ciel2. I guess I'm going to get on line and buy a new motor and a BUNCH of new switches, and some new COAX too. I'm not sure, but I think I have that copper coated steel cable, which people say doesn't work well with DC for long runs, so maybe that's my issue.

Anyway, this has been a job that I thought would take about a half hour, and it's now taken several days and I'm still not finished. It will be worth it when done though, because I now have a clear view of about a half dozen sats that I was viewing through tree limbs before. But this has sure been confusing.

 

[turbosat]

Must be Halloween early there BJ. I think you have the idea though, throw it all out and start over! LOL
Not sure about that puzzle you have, but as far as the copper-clad cable, I have several runs that are about 125' or so, one about 150', going to satellite dishes, one is a scanner antenna, and one OTA run, haven't really noticed any problems with my receivers, my OTA channels (with antenna pre-amp) nor my scanner. I'd much rather have the good stuff though, pure copper center conductor.

 

[B.J.]

Yeah, there is probably no difference in the cable, but I just ordered some solid copper stuff just in case. I had been using this dish with a bit over 200' of ribbon cable for quite a while (I took the Ku line off my BUD's ribbon cable, and hooked that up to my Fortec, and fed the Ku side from the BUD into the diseqC switch), and I'm pretty sure that the ribbon cable is copper. But 6 or 8 weeks ago, I ran out an approximately 50' longer run of the copper clad steel coax in anticipation of moving the dish. It has worked pretty much the same relative to sat signals, but I have been having increasing problems with my motor and diseqC switches, so I was starting to fear that either the extra length or the steel coax might be an issue. When I check the voltage out there, it reads properly while only powering the LNBFs which draw about 90 mA, however the voltage might drop more when the motor is being run, or it's memory written to. Unfortunately I can't observe the voltage when I'm at my STB telling the motor to save. Perhaps next time I have my meter connected, I'll ask my wife to hit the save button while I'm outside looking at the meter.

Anyway, I'm not throwing anything away, but I've ordered a new motor, new coax, 3 new switches, better connectors, new compression tool. So I am just about replacing everything.

Oh.... one other possibly related thing was that I found out yesterday that one of the ports on my QPH-031 seems to have died too. Had to switch to the other linear port. Seems like all my sat stuff is kicking the bucket at the same time, which makes me worry about some other device (STB?) causing all the failures??

 

[B.J.]

Just as an update to the above. I bought a new SG2100, a new diseqC switch, and 1000' of new copper coax. I thought that this HAS to fix the thing.
I put the new motor up, and installed the new diseqC switch, but decided to try it out before running the new coax. DIDN'T WORK. Took the motor out of the loop, just going through the diseqC switch...... NO SIGNAL. At this point, I was really confused. Only thing left was that with the long coax run, I didn't have enough diseqC signal to run the switch, but that didn't make sense, so I decided to try a different receiver. So instead of running the thing off my Diamond 9000 STB, I connected it to my TeVii USB receiver. Darn thing worked! At least through the switch (didn't try the motor). So I figured that the steel core coax must be stopping the low freq diseqC signal. So today, I ran the new 264' of copper core coax. Hooked everything up. DIDN'T WORK!?!?! Bypassed the motor. Didn't work through the diseqC switch. Bypassed the switched. GOOD SIGNAL. Switched over to my Genpix receiver. Worked with the switch. Switched to the Diamond... didn't work.
So it seemed like my Diamond was messed up, whereby, it can't send signal to control the diseqC switch, even though it worked OK to move the motor, which is also diseqC. I looked at the DC/diseqC with my Channel Master meter while connected to the Diamond, and it was jumping all over the place, DC was going on and off on/off/on/off. Anyway, I was about to pull the Diamond receiver out, and put my Coolsat 8100 back in, but tried the Diamond once more, just to get some voltage readings. Thing popped into lock, and has been working ever since.

I am real confused, but it seems like my Diamond is just working some times and not working other times. I may still replace the thing with my Coolsat, and open it up and see if there are any capacitors leaking or something, as it seems to be power related, but I need to get the dish aligned for a program I want to watch tomorrow and another one on Thursday, so I'll probably put that off.
But anyway, I'm startig to make progress diagnosing the problems anyway.
Neat about the new coax. I've always been a bit unsure of exactly how long my coax runs were, just estimating. But this new coax has length markings in feet every couple feet, so I got the whole thing accurately measured, so next time I can just measure out the right length of coax, and not have to pull little by little off the roll, and/or I can measure out and pull 2 lengths at the same time. The new copper coax has about 1/2 the resistance of the old stuff.

 

[turbosat]

progress

That's a whopper of a cable run bj, more than double any of mine. I guess I would expect problems with anything that far, but I know it's not a record at all for some of our members. You have the best coax for a long run now so it's probably not the length. Sounds like flaky receiver with the diamond. I hate those intermittent problems the most, if something is going to tear up, I'd rather it just blow up so I can toss it!

 

[Tron]

That IS a long cable run for RG-6. RG-11 might be better for such a long run, but the stuff isn't cheap. The fittings are very expensive as well, and require a special tool to terminate the cable.

 

[Cadsulfide]

BJ; I used to have anomalous problems with my setup (long runs, copper clad coax) until I went to bandstacked lnb's and powered switches. Pendragons posts on using and modifying powered switches is excellent. I use a pair of powered DP34's and a SW22 on my Azbox and it runs cool as a cucumber. IMHO most FTA receivers don't have the power supplies to run a lot of stuff before choking. Another added benefit is the lnb's are always powered, less drift.

 

[B.J.]

Well, I was just about to re-open my FIRST wierd failure post, because I just had another one today. I have to think that in some way this multitude of problems I've run into in the past month or so have to be related. But first to this response...
I do prefer, when possible to have the LNBs powered all the time, although that does make the use of any 22KHz switch I've used impossible, just because I've only used cheap switches that don't have enough isolation between the two ports to keep signal from the unused but powered port out. I'm sure it would work with high quality switches though. But I used to keep my C/Ku system powered via analog receiver, up until I had the weird failure of the Ku band coax for no apparent reason, so I've been running my C/Ku BUD off my Azbox using one coax and a diseqC switch for the past month or so. I DON'T, however like the idea of switching to anything bandstacked. With my long run, I think I'm lucky to get the 950-1450 band down my coax, let alone trying to get the higher band down. I think I'll eventually get my BUD back to having both LNBs constantly powered eventually, once I get my coax situation stabilied, but doing that with my motorized Fortec dish won't be quite as easy, but it might be possible with the proper powered switches since I'm using a QPH-031 that has 2 linear and 2 circular ports, so I could have 2 13V and 2 18V ports feeding the switch. However right now, one of my linear ports seem to not be working well, so I don't think I can do it right now.

However, on to my latest weird problem. As mentioned above, since my first weird failure, I've had the following configuration:

BUD---C/Ku/Fixed Primestar ====DiseqC switch---------------splitter--Azbox and PC receivers (power via Abox).
90CM Fortec --linear/circular/Fixed Primestar ====DiseqC switch -----splitter Diamond 9000& PC receivers (power via Diamond)

Ie two linear QPH-031 ports on Fixed Primestar/AMC-21 go to both BUD and Ku diseqC switches.

Since moving my 90CM and moving/replacing my Orbitron with a new SAMI, I had coax cables running all over the ground out by the dishes, which was not going over very well with the wife. So yesterday, I dug some trenches to bury conduit to put the coax into. Basically, the coax came out of a conduit where my 90CM used to be located, so I dug a trench from there over to my fixed Primestar, then from my Primestar over to our garage where the 90CM is now, and I also have conduit going from the Primestar over to the new SAMI BUD.
Fishing the coax to the 90CM wasn't going to be a problem, but to run the multiple wires going to the BUD was going to be difficult, since there was a big ribbon cable and a new run of RG6, and the ribbon cable had both polarotor wires and actuator power and sensor wires in addition to coax, all of which were up in the air, and would have to be disconnected to fish them through the new conduit.
So I decided NOT to disconnect ANY of the wires going to the BUD.
To do this, I ran a circular saw down the several engths of conduit, which was 2 1/2" schedule 40 conduit, cutting a slot through one side of the conduit. The kerf of the cut wasn't wide enough to slip coax or ribbon cable through, so I had to expand the slot using a pry bar, slipping spacers into the slot to hold the slot open wide enough to get the wires in. I had to put the spacers every 8 or 10", because the conduit was very rigid, and tended to close back up everywhere that there wasn't a spacer. Yesterday, I got the cable into the conduit leading to the Primestar, and everything was working fine. Today, I back filled that trench, and ran the two wires through smaller conduit over to my 90CM, which required disconnecting the main coax, and the coax running from the diseqC switch to my Primestar. Everything STILL working OK after I back filled THAT trench.
THEN, however, I again used the kerf in the conduit technique to get the wires going from the area of the Primestar over to the BUD, ie ribbon cable and RG6. I spent about a half hour slipping the cable into the conduit, then coiled up the excess to make it neater to make the wife happy. Went inside, thinking I was done, only to look at the TV, which HAD been playing PBS coming from the diseqC switch on the BUD, and the signal was gone! Confused, since I had never disconnected this line, I tried both C and Ku and Primestar Ku, ALL were dead. Pulled out my meter to check power coming out of the Azbox, and it was showing the proper voltage. Went out to the dish, checked the voltage there.... NOTHING. FOOEY I thought, I figured that I must have crimped one of the coaxes in the very tight kerf ot the conduit. So I switched to the spare coax I had just run out there. Still NOTHING!?!?! Went inside, checked voltage at Azbox again.... proper voltage there. Only other place that seemed likely was a barrel connector that I had in my basement near my computers, that connected the coax from the dish to a short 10' jumper that went upstairs to my Azbox. Checked that, and NO VOLTAGE. Connected the line from the dish to my Twinhan down there, and it worked fine.
So I replaced the 10' jumper coax with a new one, and everything was working fine again!

Anyway, it was really weird that this setup has been working in this configuration for over a month with no problems, but I go outside and do nothing but slip the wires into a conduit, and the I get a complete failure, not of the wires out where I was working, but inside next to my Azbox!

The ONLY thing that I can figure out that makes sense relates to one thing I didn't mention above, and that is, that when I went to connect the coax from my Primestar to the diseqC switch on the 90CM fortec, that it wasn't quite long enough once going through the conduit, so I didn't re-connect that line. So what I was thinking was that perhaps there was a bad ground in the coax jumper to the Azbox, but the Azbox was getting it's ground via the Primestar, which was connected to both the BUD system AND the 90CM system, but when I removed the coax to the 90CM, perhaps I was removing the ground for the Azbox????
Anyway, that's the only explanation I can come up with. Now, with the new jumper wire, everything is working better than ever, my wife is happy with the way the yard is looking with most of the wires buried, and life is back to normal. But I have to wonder if somehow that bad jumper wire might have somehow been related to some of my other problems. I'm trying to remember where that jumper was located when I first started moving my dishes around, but I have so many runs of coax here that I'm not sure what I had connected to what.