Hi, this is my first post, and let me just say that I'm really enjoying looking around on the site.
I live in the forest, and so the nearest clearing from my home was 350 feet away, and I've been able to setup my system to work where I received every single channel at 100 on a clear day and I live in northern Minnesota. Even during a decent rain storm I'd hit mid to upper 90s depending upon the storm.
For 9 years straight I had 1 blackout that lasted 5-minutes during a ridiculous snow storm, and that was the only one.
Over the years I've spent a few thousand bucks playing around with my system and I figured I'd share some of my experience since it's not commonly found, and certainly not cheap to obtain the hard "in the field" facts.
First off, RG-6 cable will go for about 100' as we all know, and 150' is stretching it. I will say that the really really expensive RG-6 (about 10 years ago) would go for 150' fairly well and I got some channels at 200'. I'd be curious about this latest technology that I see where it has super low resistance... but it's too expensive, and there are better alternatives, so I'm digressing.
My first success was with RG-11 cable. It got me into solid 100's for half the channels, and 99 or 98s for the rest with a standard dish at about 300', but once I got to my desired 350' location that extra 50' started to cost me a few numbers and I still would get blackouts during heavy storms... but hey!... this was basically a better than average setup and my dish was 350' away! I got published in my county newspaper, this was pretty cool.
Then, a long ridiculous story, I pushed the wrong button and ran over the cable with my trencher a year later.
So, I researched some more and found out that “hard line” cable was actually going to be about $50 cheaper for me (your still paying several hundreds of dollars for this stuff, and that was 2000 prices). So I bought the 1/2" “hard line” cable and used that. WOW! then I got 100's on most channels and 99 on everything else, with maybe a couple 98s.
So I research commercial setups and bought three 1-meter oval dishes (I think US Satellite made it) and pointed them to 101, 110, and 119, and they also provided a special DirecTV splicer to combine 110 and 119 so they would send down a single coax cable. 101 and 110 were the dual LNB's and 119 was a single. So with the splice, 4 cables were coming back to the house. I bought a multilink box that is called a 5-in-8-out--it receives the 4 lines from DirecTV, 1 line for the antenna, and outputs to 8 TVs.
If you go the “hard line” route, which I highly recommend for long distances, you'll need to buy our rent a special stripper tool that peals the outer cable jacket, and then another tool that hollows out the center and prepares the ends for the connectors. You'll also need to buy connectors for each end that reduce down to RG-6 sizes.
With the 1/2" “hard line” cable, I got 100's on every channel during most any day, and I never had blackouts during any rainstorm during at least a 7 year period.
OK, 2008, I decide to go with a single 5-in-1 dish that DirecTV offers because they seem larger and look like they might work out ok. So I buy one and it's not as good... and now I'm in the mid 90s for most things and I occasionally get black outs during the really bad storms... like a normal setup. Again, quite impressive for 350' in northern Minnesota, but I want my blackout free setup and would like a single dish.... why you may ask... because I like to build things... and I would think in this group, that's an understandable answer.
ANY HELP IS APPRECIATED: can anyone give me pointers to design a large dish that would be blackout free. I'm good with math, and I'm an inventive person anyway, so I can do this, I just need to do some research and learn from others... I'll start a new thread for this request, but if you happen to see it here, please give me any ideas if you have some suggestions.
I'm going to read more about the offset dishes that I see talked about here, but at first glance, what I was seeing seemed to be a single focal point and I was thinking that you could design a dish with angles designed to maximize each of the satellites
By the way, in case you're wondering how I mounted my dishes in the field clearing "near my home" (relative term)... I support all of my 3 dishes, plus my Direcway dish on a single "T-Pole" that is 6 feet off of the ground in my field. The horizontal part of the T-bar is 10 feet wide and is made from 4x4x3/8" square tubing and I welded two of these same 4x4's together vertical into a 4x8. I have over 2 yards of concrete holding it in place and I filled all of the tubes with concrete before welding them so that they wouldn't wiggle at all... and they don't! I say this because I can go as large as I need to and as you can see I'm pretty determined... I just like making stuff and the challenge. I'd like to make a single dish rather than going back to my 3 dishes.
I hope my experience can be of benefit to you.
Mark
PS. I started to read about the future and where Directv is moving towards. And I see that after the new satellite, DirecTV 11 is made fully operational they'll supplying the Dual/Triple/5-LNB dishes and move to 3-LNB Ka/Ku dishes called Slimline3, and they will see 99, 101, and 103 Degrees West. They will become the new standard dish for HD and SD programming and the 5-LNB Slimline will be used for installs in areas that receive local/international programming from 110 or 119.
I guess these Slimline3's will visually look pretty much identical to what we have now, but a smaller LNB. I see that DirecTV 11 (99.2W) launched March 19, 2008. So does this mean that the Slimline3 is now the standard or is soon to be?
I live in the forest, and so the nearest clearing from my home was 350 feet away, and I've been able to setup my system to work where I received every single channel at 100 on a clear day and I live in northern Minnesota. Even during a decent rain storm I'd hit mid to upper 90s depending upon the storm.
For 9 years straight I had 1 blackout that lasted 5-minutes during a ridiculous snow storm, and that was the only one.
Over the years I've spent a few thousand bucks playing around with my system and I figured I'd share some of my experience since it's not commonly found, and certainly not cheap to obtain the hard "in the field" facts.
First off, RG-6 cable will go for about 100' as we all know, and 150' is stretching it. I will say that the really really expensive RG-6 (about 10 years ago) would go for 150' fairly well and I got some channels at 200'. I'd be curious about this latest technology that I see where it has super low resistance... but it's too expensive, and there are better alternatives, so I'm digressing.
My first success was with RG-11 cable. It got me into solid 100's for half the channels, and 99 or 98s for the rest with a standard dish at about 300', but once I got to my desired 350' location that extra 50' started to cost me a few numbers and I still would get blackouts during heavy storms... but hey!... this was basically a better than average setup and my dish was 350' away! I got published in my county newspaper, this was pretty cool.
Then, a long ridiculous story, I pushed the wrong button and ran over the cable with my trencher a year later.
So, I researched some more and found out that “hard line” cable was actually going to be about $50 cheaper for me (your still paying several hundreds of dollars for this stuff, and that was 2000 prices). So I bought the 1/2" “hard line” cable and used that. WOW! then I got 100's on most channels and 99 on everything else, with maybe a couple 98s.
So I research commercial setups and bought three 1-meter oval dishes (I think US Satellite made it) and pointed them to 101, 110, and 119, and they also provided a special DirecTV splicer to combine 110 and 119 so they would send down a single coax cable. 101 and 110 were the dual LNB's and 119 was a single. So with the splice, 4 cables were coming back to the house. I bought a multilink box that is called a 5-in-8-out--it receives the 4 lines from DirecTV, 1 line for the antenna, and outputs to 8 TVs.
If you go the “hard line” route, which I highly recommend for long distances, you'll need to buy our rent a special stripper tool that peals the outer cable jacket, and then another tool that hollows out the center and prepares the ends for the connectors. You'll also need to buy connectors for each end that reduce down to RG-6 sizes.
With the 1/2" “hard line” cable, I got 100's on every channel during most any day, and I never had blackouts during any rainstorm during at least a 7 year period.
OK, 2008, I decide to go with a single 5-in-1 dish that DirecTV offers because they seem larger and look like they might work out ok. So I buy one and it's not as good... and now I'm in the mid 90s for most things and I occasionally get black outs during the really bad storms... like a normal setup. Again, quite impressive for 350' in northern Minnesota, but I want my blackout free setup and would like a single dish.... why you may ask... because I like to build things... and I would think in this group, that's an understandable answer.
ANY HELP IS APPRECIATED: can anyone give me pointers to design a large dish that would be blackout free. I'm good with math, and I'm an inventive person anyway, so I can do this, I just need to do some research and learn from others... I'll start a new thread for this request, but if you happen to see it here, please give me any ideas if you have some suggestions.
I'm going to read more about the offset dishes that I see talked about here, but at first glance, what I was seeing seemed to be a single focal point and I was thinking that you could design a dish with angles designed to maximize each of the satellites
By the way, in case you're wondering how I mounted my dishes in the field clearing "near my home" (relative term)... I support all of my 3 dishes, plus my Direcway dish on a single "T-Pole" that is 6 feet off of the ground in my field. The horizontal part of the T-bar is 10 feet wide and is made from 4x4x3/8" square tubing and I welded two of these same 4x4's together vertical into a 4x8. I have over 2 yards of concrete holding it in place and I filled all of the tubes with concrete before welding them so that they wouldn't wiggle at all... and they don't! I say this because I can go as large as I need to and as you can see I'm pretty determined... I just like making stuff and the challenge. I'd like to make a single dish rather than going back to my 3 dishes.
I hope my experience can be of benefit to you.
Mark
PS. I started to read about the future and where Directv is moving towards. And I see that after the new satellite, DirecTV 11 is made fully operational they'll supplying the Dual/Triple/5-LNB dishes and move to 3-LNB Ka/Ku dishes called Slimline3, and they will see 99, 101, and 103 Degrees West. They will become the new standard dish for HD and SD programming and the 5-LNB Slimline will be used for installs in areas that receive local/international programming from 110 or 119.
I guess these Slimline3's will visually look pretty much identical to what we have now, but a smaller LNB. I see that DirecTV 11 (99.2W) launched March 19, 2008. So does this mean that the Slimline3 is now the standard or is soon to be?
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