C and KU on a bud?

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fastscirocco

SatelliteGuys Family
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May 1, 2010
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Kalamazoo
How hard is it to get C and KU on a BUD, based on my reading it's best
to have seperate LNB's.

I have a 1 meter Winegard dish that I was going to set up but now I'm
thinking of going bigggger! :D with an 8 - 10 foot bud.

Or is it better to have a seperate dedicated KU and C dishs?
 
Fast, Well here's my 2 cents worth. I've have limited luck with cband and Ku on the same dish. Six to eight foot would be best or even larger. I have a Geosat c/ku lnb and an eight Fortec dish. I found I was missing quite a bit of the Ku stuff, so I have seperate small dishes for Ku stuff. 1 meter isn't anywhere large enough for reliable Cband. There are several posts here on Cband on a small dish....do a search under "minibud". Blind
 
Combined C/Ku reception on a big dish is at best a compromise. It can work reasonably well, but in many cases the Ku reception is no better than on a dedicated 1.0-1.2m Ku dish. Often it is worse. Peaking a BUD for Ku is far more exacting than for C-band alone, but that is not enough to explain the lack of performance on a carefully adjusted setup.

There are usually multiple reasons for this, but the two that always come up are the less than perfect surfaces on typical large FTA reflectors (mesh and perf) and losses in combined C/Ku feeds. Unless you have an incredible dish, separate C and Ku systems tend to work the best.
 
I used a DMX741U C/Ku combo lnb. with a 6 ft dish. I have the lnb tuned mainly for C-band, but it will pick up about 80% of ku channels. The dish is motorized, and I noticed some of the weaker Ku sats (SATMEX, Intelsat) the Ku is weak or don't show period. I can view from 12.5W to 129W. I have separate dishes for ku (3 & 4 ft) which is dedicated using a motor for ku. It generally gets evertyhing in the North American footprint between 12.5W to 129W, that the combo cannot get.
I have several lnbs (BSC621, etc) and found that the DMX741 C/Ku so far is the best combo(easiest) for receiving C & ku, without going the expensive route of getting a Chaparral feedhorn with polarizer and separate lnbs.
 
When my BUD was new, it got Ku quite well. Much better than my 3' Fortec. However now that my BUD is old, warped and dented, the Ku reception is worse than the Fortec. It is also a bit more of a challenge to align a dish for Ku, since the beamwidth is narrower.
With a C/Ku feed, the Ku feed will generally not be seeing the whole dish, perhaps only 1/2 of it, but that's still better than a 3'. The main difference I noticed was separation of adjacent sats. With the 3' dish I could see signal from adjacent sats, however with the BUD, this was not a problem.
So, I'd say that if you have a new dish that is relatively good quality, and is aligned well, that Ku performance will be better than you'd get with a 3'dish, so I think it's worth it to get a C/Ku feed, however those looking for every ounce of signal on C-band tend to recommend C-band only feeds. I have no experience to compare C-band on a C-band only vs C/Ku. I've owned both, but they were on different dishes, so I couldn't directly compare them, but there weren't any obvious differences that I noticed.
 
In terms of C-band losses, I've measured a single orthomode feed (C-band only) against a dual orthomode feed (C/Ku) a few times in reasonably well-controlled tests, including one time where I swapped the C-band LNBs and another where I moved one LNB back and forth. The results indicated about a 0.5-1.0 dB loss in CNR for C-band on the dual ortho vs. a single ortho.

I have not tested combo feeds and corotors. But in public and private correspondence with a few people who have the equipment and know-how, they all concluded a corotor has at least a further 1 dB loss on C-band over a dual ortho. Unfortunately the performance of low-cost combo feeds has been all over the map to the extent it makes any generalizations on performance meaningless.

We now come to Ku-band losses of dual orthos, combo feeds and corotors. I wish I had a bag of quantitative information, but it's very hard to come by. I've tested my dual ortho with its stock LNB mounts on all my BUDs. I was able to get good reception but never amazing on Ku. My 1.2m offset beat the BUDs with the dual ortho in nearly every shoot-out. I have recently been half-heartedly trying a Ku prime-focus feed a bit off-axis on one of my BUDs, but I've found no reason to doubt that the Ku BUD losses are partly because of an imperfect parabaloid.

Last year I spent some time adapting a dual ortho feed to an Invacom C-120-flanged LNB, with the intent of improving the performance of my 1.8m solid petal (prime-focus) dish over a 1.2m offset using an integral Invacom LNBF. In a perfect world the 1.8m should produce 3.5 dB better CNRs than the 1.2m. After tweaking the 1.8m to the point of exhaustion, I was only able at best to see a 1 dB improvement. Was the missing 2.5 dB caused by surface deviations of the reflector or losses in the feed? I have no way of knowing because I ran out of time and was unable to compare a prime-focus feed on the flanged Invacom.

I have certain suspicions. Any type of C/Ku combo feed must by reality lack an effective scalar at Ku frequencies. If you've ever compared reception on C-band with and without a scalar, and/or Ku-band with feeds with effective scalars vs. something with little or none (like a 121 Superdish feed), you'll already suspect a good reason. The C-band scalar on a combo feed coupled with the outside C-band waveguide is probably better than nothing, but not by a lot. There is also the problem of getting the Ku energy from the front of the feed to the back where the Ku LNB(s) are located.

Having recently put up a 1.8m Prodelin offset for Ku-only reception, I've been running simple experiments on Ku feeds that may provide some other clues. This reflector came with a massive Tx/Rx box sitting at the end of a conical scalar that's a bit more than 5" in diameter at its mouth. I machined an adaptor from this feed to one of my C120-flanged Invacoms and this 1.8m combination measured about 3.8-4.0 dB better than the 1.2m/Invacom system. While on the surface this is better than theory, there is a possible explanation. The f/D of the 1.2m reflector is 0.5, which is somewhat less than the 0.6 of the feed design employed. This would cause the 1.2m to be underscanned, leading to some loss of gain.

What is intriguing me is the Prodelin has a f/D of 0.6, but the feed it came with seems to be outperforming some other examples I've substituted. I'm perfectly willing to believe it is (1) a better feed, or more likely (2) is better matched to the reflector. I don't know where this will go, but I'm curious about trying some drastically different feeds on my prime-focus dishes to see if I can improve the match at Ku. But this is only of academic interest to me because the 1.8m Prodelin is so outstanding on Ku that it makes we wonder what benefit I could possibly gain by further horsing around.
 
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Interesting discussion although over 6 years old. I started my second experimentation with a combo c/ku corotor today on my ancient Perfect 10 10 footer (up about ten feet). I got my Echostar 400 (C1994) IRD for moving and skew control.I don't know why BUT reception is BETTER on the C-band side than with my Titanium C1-PLL LNBF...ATLEAST, when it comes to pickup up Shephard's Chapel on G16/99w AND is better, according to both my dvb-s (Vortex Pro 7700) and DVB-S2 (X2) receivers on G19 C and KU (Quality on the KU side of G19 is 20 points better than my 3' offset with Titanium lnbf)..I haven't had a chance to scan the KU side of SES-2 87w BUT before, I was able to get The Florida Channel fairly well.

I have been offered a 180cm stationary offset with single polarity Norsat for free. Would like to find an H-H mover for it as I can always go back to the 3 footer for G19-only..(My Stab H-H on it NEVER did work well and NOW doesn't respond at all). I also have another 10 ft mesh I "may" setup eventually.

I'm interested in these Ortho feeds. Have seen a few on Ebay for 60 bux or less....My goal is to find a 10 ft OR larger solid, although I haven't a clue how I'd get it home MUCH less setup...


Thanks...
 
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I have a similar setup to nycrich with similar results. I plan to get a bigger dish one day but for now I am having a blast with what I have. I have been pretty amazed at what all I have been able to receive. I have stated this before the main reason I got into this hobby was for NASA-TV, I was going to park the 6' dish at (then 105w) and call it done. Then I saw all that was up there and away I went.

I think that the 6' solid dish does awesome on Ku with the combo LNBf, for C-Band I would love a bigger dish for sure. I will most likely stay with one dish for both but replace the reflector with an 8 foot solid like the WS International WS24095 and for $270 it seems like a good deal. I plan to keep the same mount since I have allready upgrded the acuator with a heavy duty 36-inch QARL SuperJack. I'm a fan of the solid dish for Ku band and the combo C/Ku LNBf is the ease of just one LNBf.

I am still quite the noob though, keep that in mind.
 
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Love to have an 8 or 10' solid that was well made, and use it for ku only. My little 1m primestars serve me well, but I'm sure a bigger dish would clear up a few iffy feeds. When you see what cable companies use to receive with, makes me envious.
 
Love to have an 8 or 10' solid that was well made, and use it for ku only. My little 1m primestars serve me well, but I'm sure a bigger dish would clear up a few iffy feeds. When you see what cable companies use to receive with, makes me envious.
I know what you mean, when I was a cable installer back in the day for Time Warner our office was at the head end for Waco TX and there was about 8 or 10 10 to 12 foot solid dishes all parked on different satellites. Come to think of it, Austin took over the head end before charter bought them out so I wounder what they did with all those dishes? I have a buddy that still works there I guess I should look into that. I already messed up on a deal from I guy I knew that worked at a local TV station. He said I could come get a dish they had laying on the ground but when I saw it I knew there was no way I could move it. I should have figured something out because that mug was BIG!

Next time I'm saying YES no mater what.
 
How hard is it to get C and KU on a BUD, based on my reading it's best
to have seperate LNB's.

I have a 1 meter Winegard dish that I was going to set up but now I'm
thinking of going bigggger! :D with an 8 - 10 foot bud.

Or is it better to have a seperate dedicated KU and C dishs?

I've never had good results with a dual feed or dual LNBF. IMO, it would be better to have separate dishes for C and Ku.
 
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I have a similar setup to nycrich with similar results. I plan to get a bigger dish one day but for now I am having a blast with what I have. I have been pretty amazed at what all I have been able to receive. I have stated this before the main reason I got into this hobby was for NASA-TV, I was going to park the 6' dish at (then 105w) and call it done. Then I saw all that was up there and away I went.

I think that the 6' solid dish does awesome on Ku with the combo LNBf, for C-Band I would love a bigger dish for sure. I will most likely stay with one dish for both but replace the reflector with an 8 foot solid like the WS International WS24095 and for $270 it seems like a good deal. I plan to keep the same mount since I have allready upgrded the acuator with a heavy duty 36-inch QARL SuperJack. I'm a fan of the solid dish for Ku band and the combo C/Ku LNBf is the ease of just one LNBf.

I am still quite the noob though, keep that in mind.

WSI has been out of business for at least three years. Galaxy marketing was their retail division. Not saying the dish is no good, but beware of who you purchase from. Best to ask here first!

Catamount
 
WSI has been out of business for at least three years. Galaxy marketing was their retail division. Not saying the dish is no good, but beware of who you purchase from. Best to ask here first!

Catamount

Oh Wow, who are these mugs? Did they buy the name http://www.wsidigital.com/

I really want to get an 8' solid and I was actually going by the review I read here on Satelliteguys by user PopcornNMore. Pretty positive review too. I guess I was hoping that my mount would be a match for the 8' since they look like the center ring is the same. size.
 
The lights are still on but no one is home at that website. I wish they would take it down, but it has been sitting like that for 3 years.
 
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The lights are still on but no one is home at that website. I wish they would take it down, but it has been sitting like that for 3 years.
Why are 8 foot solid dishes so hard to find? A few years back I remember seeing a dish that was a 6' with extension panels that made it 8' total. I have seen do it yourself projects where people extended their dishes but I think it would be to much work to get the shape exactly right. Then I see these alibaba made in china bs websites every time I try to search for "8' solid c-band" or "240cm Prime focus" and it gets really frustrating. I guess I will keep searching for someone getting rid of one.
 
Just not very popular anymore. We FTA'ers are a niche group. C-Band dishes are still made and purchased by cable companies and such, but they usually purchase a minimum of 10'.
 
Just not very popular anymore. We FTA'ers are a niche group. C-Band dishes are still made and purchased by cable companies and such, but they usually purchase a minimum of 10'.

I see, well what about using 2 6' dishes to combine the signal to one receiver? Would it be possible to have say an "array" of dishes kind of like a miniature VLA (very large array) like the radio telescope array in New Mexico on a much smaller scale of course?
 
B.R.......As others have probably said, keep perusing Craigslist and other similar sites. There's still plenty of idle C-band dishes in the upper MIdwest, I can't imagine not having them in most semi-rural areas....I have a realtor friend who is always making sure if a house has a "BUD" that I'm contacted if the seller or buyer doesn't want it Perhaps you can let local realtors know of your interest and ability to give large dshes a new home. I may not use it myself, but friends who have watched my dish farm grow are intrigued and some have started FTA...mainly for the quality of picture on networks, and the fact it's NO ongoing fees... BTW, I've had decent C/Ku with combination LNB's but the tweaking for first setup takes patience....and the more elusive ku signals really need dedicated dish, but..you CAN enjoy ku from an 8 foot solid, easily.
 
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