Finally!

[Pixl]

OMG......

History is history on 101... I'm grieving.. :river

I don't know what else to do but I'm really getting angry at this whole thing, losing channels like mad on KU. :rant:

Dee,

Here is a little song I borrowed from another web page.
Maybe this will cheer you up.

Hi,

Oh where oh were could my History Channel be
The Hotel Networks took it away from me
It's gone real black so I've got to be good
So I can see my History Channel when I turn on my new TV

We were out in the yard adjusting our new dish
We hadn't turned very far
There in the yard Straight ahead
The Hotel Networks Police shot my friend really dead
I couldn't stop So I cried all night
I'll never forget the sound that night
The screamin kids The busting glass
The Painfull scream that I heard last.

Oh where oh were could my History Channel be
The Hotel Networks took it away from me
It's gone real black so I've got to be good
So I can see my History Channel when I turn on my new TV

When I woke up
The rain was pouring down
There were people standing all around
Something warm & fuzzy caught my eyes
But some how I found my History Channel that night

When I turned on my TV
It kinda looked at me and said
Watch me darling just alittle while

I held the remote
I kissed it our last kiss
I found the love I knew I had missed
but now it's really gone
even though I thought it was in the clear
I lost my love, my life the other night

Oh where oh were could my History Channel be
The Hotel Networks took it away from me
It's gone real black so I've got to be good
So I can see my History Channel when I turn on my my new TV

ooooooooooooooooo
oooooo oooooooooo
ooooooooooooo

OOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOO OOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOO
.....................

FB

 

[Dee_Ann]

LOL!!!!

 

[Dee_Ann]

I need to relocate that info you guys posted last year about changing the biddog settings to work better on FTA satellites.

Right now I need to sit down and re-study the editor for the birddog that lets you create your own profiles for it. The company sent it to me last year and I messed with it a little but it's mostly over my head, most of the things you have to know about to use it, I don't really understand or know anything about.

And on the installs, now I'm back to square zero, again. I'm starting to wonder if this is like my version of Groundhog Day.. Over and over and over again and again and again, the same thing. I get someone lined up to do the work to put these flippin dishes up and then they are no show and the loop repeats..

 

[Dee_Ann]

OMG....

The dude is in my back yard digging the holes right now!!

Ground hog day is finally over!!

At the rate he's going it's going to take a few days but it's going.

 

[turbosat]

Ta-Da! Maybe you'll get that cband up yet Dee.

 

[Dee_Ann]

Woo hoo!!

So, he dug like one and 3/4 holes today. He darn sure earned his money today, let me tell you! He was too worn out to finish the 2nd hole so he called it quits for the day.

Tomorrow I'm going to go buy the cement for one hole and have it sitting in my van. When he gets off work he'll come over and I'll use my mower / trailer to move the cement to the back yard. He of course will have to move the sacks, I can not. I'm just driving the mower.

So he'll mix the cement and set the first pole tomorrow evening and finish digging the 2nd hole.

Thursday I'll go back and buy another van load of cement and Thursday evening he'll return to finish setting the last pole. Then he gets Benjamin #2 of 2.

This is a HUGE step forward! THIS means that yes, the flippin dishes ARE going up, at loooooong last!

I figure to let the cement set up at least a full week before trying to put the dishes on the pole.

My dad still has to do some welding on the ring that goes on the back of the huge dish but there's time for that still while the cement sets.

When it's time, the same dude said he'll bring his nephew over and they will put the dishes on top of the poles for me..

So, finally.. OMG... I thought I would never see this day!

I'm sure glad my friend made up with her BF and let him move back in with her! Rent-a-man to the rescue!

 

[Anole]

Very nice pictures!
No faces nor butt-cracks showing!

As for your farm of little Ku dishes, that's a sweet one!
All commercial molded models, it appears.
The lady goes first class! -

 

[zamar23]

Yah, it looks like Dee_Ann assembled a quality dish farm. I may missed the show, but where is the Ku- motorized one that was planned to go first?

Suddenly we are in C-band instead? It also looks like big treas are well on the way of some dishes. Are you planning to equip both C-dishes with actuators - higher poles may be needed?

 

[Dee_Ann]

Very nice pictures!
No faces nor butt-cracks showing!

Nope! I was soooo glad not to see butt-crack. Ewwwwww....
And when I walked out with my camera he was like "Oh no! Don't you put my picture on facebook!"
I promised him I wouldn't and he said ok, I got really lucky and snapped a picture at just the right time to respect his privacy.

As for your farm of little Ku dishes, that's a sweet one!
All commercial molded models, it appears.

I have to give credit to my ex. Those are all his doing, he collected those and a ton of those little pizza dishes plus all those giant Cbands that got bulldozed last year when we sold the lot. I think he was a bit of a kook with so many of the things but in the end it works out good for me so I can't complain too much. He left them all in various states of disrepair and disassembly so it was up to me to put them all back together and figure out how to get them to work. It has NOT been easy. I am however, learning.

The lady goes first class! -

I try.. Thanks!

Oh and here's the dishes from the front, I took this a few weeks ago I think, back when the lawnchair dish was pointed at Cuba.
I've since then moved it to PBS and in the next week or two will juggle them all around, again. I am determined to get one of them working on the ku motor I bought like over a year ago that has yet to have spent more than 10 minutes outside the box.

I need to rethink what it is I want to do with them all and come up with some sort of plan where I have fixed dishes on my favorite satellites and motorized dishes to cover the rest.

I ~think~ I can do it. I sort of have a vision in mind for the end result, just getting there, that's the challenge.

 

[Dee_Ann]

Rent-a-man came through today..

1st picture is from doggy-cam. You can see the little 6' dish that is going on the pole that was planted today. And of course my existing dishes, the holes he dug yesterday and my mower/trailer for towing the cement from my van to my back yard.

Then the cement in my van, 15 bags of it. Just under $60 !!!

And the remaining pictures is Rent-a-man getting the job done.

He did a really excellent job. My dad drilled holes in the pole and put some rebarb in it so that it can not rotate once the cement dries. That made it sort of though for the guy to maneuver the pole but he got it all lined up the right way, mixed the cement and leveled the pole perfectly with a large professional level.

Oh, and those online cement calculators were ALL wrong. It took only 9 sacks of cement, not 15. Even so, I'm here to tell you, that son of a gun ain't going nowhere! No way, no how!

So there was some left over cement which is fine, he told me how many more bags I need to go get tomorrow to finish the job. The other hole is deeper so it's going to take more cement.

Tomorrow I go back and pick up up 6 more bags of cement and when he gets off work he'll come over and finish the second pole for the 10' dish.

I figure I should let the cement set up at least a week before I attempt to put the dishes on them.

My dad still has to weld up the ring for the big dish anyway so that one can't go up until then anyway. But I can go ahead and start with the 6' dish first.

I do have a motor for it but I don't really plan on setting it up just yet to be controlled by the pc. I still have to buy a second gbox for it.

I have one gbox and I'm going to put it on the 10' dish. I want to be able to control it first.

So I am thinking that I'll aim the smaller 6' dish at either the satellite with This TV or ME TV or Family TV. I need to look at what they all have to offer and decide which one to lock it down on. I'll worry about making it movable in a few months.

WOW!! Seriously, I thought I would never see this day!

Let me tell you, my friend's boyfriend, he earned his money on this job. That was some serious labor he put into this. I could not have done it. No way...

 

[Magic Static]

Yikes It looks as if the pole was put in upside down!???

 

[Dee_Ann]

No no... It's right...

My dad made an adapter for that 6' dish. Apparently it was made to fit on metric poles.

As it came, it didn't fit ANYTHING you could find in the US.

So, my dad made this little adapter for it on a machine in his garage.

He took a short piece of three inch fence pole and shaved it down so it would fit inside the satellite and the outside of it would slip inside a standard US water pipe. So he bought a piece of water pipe that would fit not only for this adapter he built, it fit perfectly for the big 10' dish as well.

He modified the 6' dish thing by grinding off some of it's parts that it came with and drilling holes in it and putting bolts through both parts so they became one part. Then on the big water pipe he drilled holes in it and put bolts through it, the adapter slips into the water pipe then you tighten the bolts to lock the adapter into the pipe.

My dad gets his jollies making things so he was all proud of this adapter part he made for me. It doesn't look very pretty but he promises me it will be way stronger than the dish. And I agree with him, I believe the first good storm is gonna destroy that dish like a wilted flower.

It's just way to flimsy to survive hurricane season. We get plenty of them here and they are telling us we are going to have a very busy one this year..


So anyway, no worries, those bolts sticking out of the top are very much supposed to be like that. The rebarbs are sticking out of the bottom, down about three feet into the cement below the surface. The poor guy that put the pole in, had fits trying to get the pipe turned just right..


______________________________________


edit: Awesomeness prevails! I just checked The List and I see that This TV and MeTV are both on the 87 satellite, AMC 3. And even better, both channels are on horizontal as well as the Nasa channels. Everything on Horizontal. This means I won't have to worry about the polar motor problem!

So I can aim the little 6' dish at 87 and pretty much just leave it there. I can actually just connect that dish into my 8 way switch out there like the other ku dishes. No worries about motors at all for now.
It will just sit there like a dumb, immobile ku dish does now, just picking up cband instead.

I can worry about getting a new, modern lnb and a gbox for it later in the summer.

This will let me focus on the big 10' dish, for which I have a gbox already, a 22k switch and a modern lnb that changes polarity automatically without motors. I think I know how to do it so that the 22k switch selects between either the ku dishes (and the small 6' C dish) cluster and the big 10' dish. I think..

OMG! I'm so excited now to be getting sooooo close to actually, FINALLY getting the Cbands up! @party

 

[Dishman Dan]

Then the cement in my van, 15 bags of it. Just under $60 !!!.

Looks like it is coming along!! :clap

I know things are bigger in Texas... but...

How big is that van?

15 bags x 80# each = 1200 pounds!!!

 

[Pixl]

Hi Dee,

I'm wondering from your pictures about pole leveling. I don't see any temp support arms to keep the pole level while pouring the concrete?

 

[Dee_Ann]

The van, is big. A full size 80's Chevy van. It can seat 12 people but I have all the seats removed except the front seats and one bench seat in the back. I use it to carry my dogs to the vet and what not. It's a gas hog so I rarely drive it but it can carry a LOT of stuff.


As to leveling the posts. The guy mixed the cement so it was like peanut butter. He put the pole in the center of the hole then began to pour cement in. As he put more cement in he would straighten the pole more and more and when the last bag was dumped in he leveled it up perfectly along the four points of the compass and stepped away. The cement was gooey enough that it didn't need supports. I checked several times after he left for level and it stayed perfect. I checked it today and it's still perfect and the cement is pretty much hard to the touch though I think it would be best to wait till next week to put the dish on it, just to be sure.

The BIG dish, that one is still a week or two away from being ready to put up so that cement (getting done this evening) will have plenty of time to set good and proper.




Edit: Adding some pictures of the pole for the 10' dish with the rebarb through it.

 

[turbosat]

That's good progress! And I have to tell you-I have put a dish on a green pole before, usually 2days is all I can possibly wait for concrete to cure, lol. But that was in really hot, dry weather and the stuff was pretty solid before I started stressing it. A 10'mesh isn't that heavy anyway, the wind-loading is what you have to think about for the first few days, then after that-the storms. I think you'll be blown away by c-band tv, the digital, and whatever analog you might get too, if you have an analog receiver. And if you don't have one, PM me, I still have several that are wasting , move the dish, run the polarity motor too.

 

[Dee_Ann]

That's good progress! And I have to tell you-I have put a dish on a green pole before, usually 2days is all I can possibly wait for concrete to cure, lol. But that was in really hot, dry weather and the stuff was pretty solid before I started stressing it. A 10'mesh isn't that heavy anyway, the wind-loading is what you have to think about for the first few days, then after that-the storms. I think you'll be blown away by c-band tv, the digital, and whatever analog you might get too, if you have an analog receiver. And if you don't have one, PM me, I still have several that are wasting , move the dish, run the polarity motor too.

Gaaaaaah!!! Don't tempt me!

I might get the guy putting the posts in to help me put the little 6' dish up in the morning when he shows up to finish. He took the day off Thursday, that was cool with me, no problems..

I'm just now realizing that the 6' dish, is going to be 6' up in the air. So the LNB is going to be a few feet above that meaning I'm going to have to have a tall ladder to work on the bleeping thing!

It's been a few days since he put the first pole up and it's been uncomfortably warm. I am pretty sure that I could put the 6' dish up.
As for adjusting it, HA! No clue!

I think I want to get one of those little handle held LCD tuners you guys were talking about that are being sold on ebay as meters when in fact they are just miniature tuners and LCD TV's. I think that used in conjunction with my birddog meter would be pretty useful.

 

[Dishman Dan]

I'm just now realizing that the 6' dish, is going to be 6' up in the air. So the LNB is going to be a few feet above that meaning I'm going to have to have a tall ladder to work on the bleeping thing!

It is a lot easier to cut the pole down a bit than to make a pole taller!

Your helper can cut it down some with a portable bandsaw or angle grinder with a

cut off wheel or even a torch!

 

[Dee_Ann]

It is a lot easier to cut the pole down a bit than to make a pole taller!

Very, very true...

For now I'm going to leave it be.

I don't expect the 6' dish to last long and it will probably have to be replaced after the first good tropical storm comes through here.
So I guess it's a good thing that the pole turned out taller than I was expecting. If it had turned out as I had originally thought, that pole would have been short and thus only able to be used for little dishes like the one that's going on it first, bigger dishes wouldn't have worked on it.

No all boo boo's are bad. I think this one will turn out for the best..

 

[Dee_Ann]

Well....

Dude came back today to finish. For a while I was afraid he was flaking out on me but he did finally finish up.

So anyway..

The hole for the the BIG dish, the other day he tired out and stopped digging. He came back the next day and did the cement for the first hole (for the 6' dish) and stopped.
He took Thursday off and then today came back and finished digging the 2nd hole and put the pole and cement in.

Problem though, he could not dig any deeper than 4'. The plan was for the hole to be 5' deep. But the handles of the digger were hitting the sides and he couldn't get any deeper and couldn't pick up any more dirt. He had hit the physical limit of the hand diggers.

We stood there and discussed it and he insisted that the pole was not going anywhere. I wasn't convinced but there really was nothing else that could be done without renting a machine and taking days more time and even more money. So I made the decision and told him to go ahead and plant the pole as it was.

I got out of the way and let him do his thing.

He ended up with the hole 4' deep but it was slightly bigger around than the other hole and took 11 sacks of cement (vs 9 on the other pole).

I ~hope~ that this will be strong enough to keep that 10' dish in place through storms. Not that I have any choice in it... I had really hoped that he could put the thing 5' in. Oh well..

So now the poles both ended up a lot taller than I expected.

The small one, it's 6' out of the ground. The big one, is 7' 8" out of the ground.

I'm thinking they are going to need to be braced up somehow. I don't know..


Anyway, after he finished the cement I got him to put the 6' dish on the pole.

So the little dish is up there now and much closer to being able to actually work than ever before.

But, I have no idea what my next step is. I guess I need to figure out how to put the motor on it. The other problem is the lnb. I have an old c-ku lnb but it has a motor in it that changes the polarity. I have no idea how to make the motor change. I have no idea how to mount the lnb in the dish. It can be slid closer to or further away from the dish in the ring out in the center. And then which way to rotate it??

Then there is aiming the dish. And the motor. I have no idea how it goes on. Or how to adjust it.

Right now the dish is just sitting on the top of the pole like a wilted flower with nothing connected. I need to figure out my next step now. I am now into something that I have no knowledge of.

I do know this much. I want to aim this small dish at satellite 87w, I think it is an AMC satellite. I want to get This TV and MeTV. I won't complain if I can get Nasa too.

I know that both of those channels are on horizontal channels.
That should mean that the lnb won't need to change polarity.

To get it adjusted to the right spot I can use the gbox (which I have no idea how to use either). Once I get it aimed at the right place I will remove the gbox and I can connect the lnb to the 8way switch just as if it were another ku lnb. Right?

I can assign a switch port to that dish/lnb just as if it were a ku dish. It won't be motorized at all for the time being so that should make it easy once it's set. It will more or less stay aimed at 87 for the foreseeable future. The 10' dish is the one that I plan to fully motorize. I'm still weeks away from that happening.

I guess now I need to plow through old threads on these little 6' dishes and try to figure out from the pictures how you guys put the motors and lnb's on them. I'm ~hoping~ to be able to start watching stuff on 87 Cband this weekend.