"Disappearing" Ku channels?

[Lak7]

I was afraid if I tried moving the Ku dish with the Diamond it would get the dish out of sync for my Visionsat and I would have to start over.

Just don't set the Diamonds motor control, use the Visionsat to drive the Dish via the Diamonds Loop Out.

 

[phlatwound]

Just don't set the Diamonds motor control, use the Visionsat to drive the Dish via the Diamonds Loop Out.

I had never considered running things that way, figured since the Visionsat was running everything it should be as close to the signal sources as possible. Seems like putting it at the end of the chain would make it worse but I'll give it a try.

After further testing I'm not seeing much difference whether I go through the switch or not. I also tried Anole's suggestion of bumping the frequencies up and down, nothing there either.

The more I mess with this, the more I keep going back to thinking it's being affected by signal strength. All my C-band stuff comes in at 80% + SQ and it all locks immediately, and I don't seem to have any trouble immediately locking Ku signals that are that high in SQ (of which I don't have many...WhiteSprings and "Dish @ 121" to name a couple). What's weird is when I finally get those "weaker" channels to "appear" they have plenty of signal strength (35-50%) and I can watch them indefinitely....or until I change the channel. !sadroll

May try to bump my dish to purposely lessen my C-band signal strength and see if it will do the same thing that happens on Ku.

I love this stuff!

 

[rv1pop]

Just a dumb Idea, but I just had a simular problem, and I found that someway my sat. setup had gotten the 22hz set to auto (on four satellites!). As soon as I set it to "ON" or "OFF" depending of the final setup with the switches I was using, (even without the switches installed) the problem disappeared. I do not think I set it to AUTO!

 

[phlatwound]

Just a dumb Idea, but I just had a simular problem, and I found that someway my sat. setup had gotten the 22hz set to auto (on four satellites!). As soon as I set it to "ON" or "OFF" depending of the final setup with the switches I was using, (even without the switches installed) the problem disappeared. I do not think I set it to AUTO!

Thanks for your thoughts, Pop, I'll take all the "dumb ideas" I can get....especially from guys that have probably forgotten more about this stuff than I might ever know!

I'll doublecheck my sat setups tonight. :up

 

[Lak7]

Did the Diamond pick it up OK?

 

[phlatwound]

Did the Diamond pick it up OK?

I didn't get a chance to switch them out last night but will this weekend.

If I can't cure this my next thought to experiment with was....What would I have to do to configure the Diamond (or Coolsat 6000) to move my Ku dish, to basically take the place of the Visionsat which controls everything now (except movement/polarity switching of my BUD)?

I think I know how to do the dish/sat setup menus but was wondering how to "index" the new receiver to my Ku dish? I figured I could just hookup whatever new receiver I wanted to a tv (not hooked into my setup) and have all the setup entered before I hooked it in?

Do I have to totally zero out/reset the motor and start over? Do I pre-point my Ku-dish to a known location and then when I fire up the new receiver "tell" it where the dish is pointing and go from there?

 

[Lak7]

Just park the dish on 123, disconnect the VisionSat, connect the Diamond and check signal.
If you are using USALS, just enter your Long / Lat info in the Diamond, that's it.

 

[phlatwound]

Just park the dish on 123, disconnect the VisionSat, connect the Diamond and check signal.
If you are using USALS, just enter your Long / Lat info in the Diamond, that's it.

That sounds way too easy, but I'll probably figure out a way to screw it up, thanks Lak.

 

[drhydro]

Have you checked to see if your diseq switch has gone wonky?

 

[phlatwound]

Have you checked to see if your diseq switch has gone wonky?

yes drhydro, I pulled it out totally and bypassed it with a barrel connector, that didn't seem to make any difference. I also had another brand new Ecoda, tired it, no change, either.

There's just no consistency to how it acts....good news is I can almost always get it to work, just takes some messing around.

 

[phlatwound]

Well I've been messing with this for a couple more days and still can't nail down the issue.

Since the problem is only on the Ku side I swapped the C & Ku coaxes that come in from outside, no change.

I'm pulling my Visionsat outside to the dish and going to test without the ribbbon cable in the mix, we'll see....

 

[phlatwound]

Not going to do an all-out Snoopy-style happy dance yet, but I think I may have this thing whooped.

If I'm correct, the problem was out at the dish......and it was related to the position (not the alignment or tuning) of the dish. How's that for a cryptic clue?

I'll give it a couple of days to make a fool of me (again) before it gets a clean bill of health. Thanks to everyone for your suggestions.

 

[stogie5150]

I was thinking from the beginning: this man has a switch problem. I have had a couple disecq switches do that on me...

I smashed 'em with a maul. No more problems.

I'd check that switch, and the coax ends for that matter, before I did anything else.

Good luck finding it. :up

 

[1captain]

I smashed 'em with a maul. No more problems.
.

most people don't know what a maul is, I do got a 18lb here an it will do do some damage, pluss wear you out working it.

 

[phlatwound]

I was thinking from the beginning: this man has a switch problem. I have had a couple disecq switches do that on me...

I smashed 'em with a maul. No more problems.

I'd check that switch, and the coax ends for that matter, before I did anything else.

Good luck finding it. :up

stogie, I'm a little disappointed (I like to smash things too ) to say that I'm pretty sure my one and only switch (Ecoda) in my setup had nothing to do with my problem.

In the multitude of variations that I experimented with I could tell no difference even when I pulled the switch out of the circuit.

Now your other thought (coax) is getting warmer, in fact I'd say "give that man a cigar"!

I finally took my Visionsat/small tv combo out to the dish, hooked it up and proceeded to put it through it's paces through 6' of coax, instead of 100' of ribbon cable and a switch.

After about an hour of seeing same old stuff, I changed the LNBF out....no help. I finally kind of noticed a pattern that I was having more trouble with the sats fairly close to my true south, but it never was consistent in any way.

Turns out it was the coax that runs from the motor to the LNB, when the dish was skewed over east or west it would tend to make a connection, but when it was more straight up and down sometime the connection would drop out.......it was very intermittent.

I had wiggled that cable several times but I'm guessing I must have done it when the dish was skewed over and I just never got it to show.

Pretty sure this was caused by me having 2 zipties holding the coax to the support arm....and having those zipties too tight, they didn't allow the coax to have free movement. Rookie noob mistake.

*the above novel is totally moot if I find out it was something else, in which case I will probably smash something*

 

[phlatwound]

I smashed 'em with a maul. No more problems.
.

most people don't know what a maul is, I do got a 18lb here an it will do do some damage, pluss wear you out working it.

hey captain, a person hasn't lived till they've spent a good day busting up cordwood with a splitting maul, I've got a couple of 8 pounders and they are all I can handle.

18 pounder......

 

[SatPhreak]

Yea those big guys are too much for me. Where I used to work we had 12,16,18, and 20 pound sledge hammers. The 18's were marginal for me and the 20's were just to big for repetitive hitting. 3 or 4 swings and I'd go looking for a 16#er.

 

[oncewaslost]

6.) I bypassed my Ku dish motor (DG380) to see if I was getting some signal loss there....no discernible loss, no change.

Hey phlatwound,

Did you resolve this problem? Was the motor completely out of the circuit when you bypassed it?

 

[phlatwound]

Hey phlatwound,

Did you resolve this problem? Was the motor completely out of the circuit when you bypassed it?

Yes I did resolve it it, I had a bad end on a coax where it attached to the LNBF, pretty sure it was caused by my zipties not letting the coax move/rotate as the dish moved with the motor.

And yes, the motor was completely out of the circuit when I was troubleshooting that, I could tell no difference whatsoever.