Fooling My Motor

[cyberham]

For purists, yesterday I took the effort to tweak my dish such that now the USALS coordinates I enter are precisely my exact dish lat/long coordinates as confirmed using a GPS at the dish. Result? Reception is no different than before when I cheated by manually touching up the USALS longitude just a little. Except I do have a rosy sunburn from standing in the sun for some time yesterday. I still can't get 15W anymore presumably due to summer putting leaves on the tree sticks that I like in winter time.

 

[Trip]

So, my dish got bumped at some point and I had to line it back up this morning. I think I may have figured out what happened. It appears that my Manhattan receiver and the Prog Finder software on the computer disagree about the USALS calculations. I used the same lat/long in both, but when I used the Manhattan, the motor was set slightly differently than with my software. Because I tend to use my Manhattan to do the initial aiming and then tweak it into place with the software once I think I'm tracking right and everything, I can definitely see how I might have gotten slightly off.

And it now seems to track fine since I used the software to set the USALS before tweaking.

- Trip

 

[Tron]

I usually have any PC-based receivers (PC cards or USB) slaved to a receiver. One reason I do this is that many PC cards do not output enough current to properly operate a motor.

 

[Trip]

My receiver, the TeVii S660, has an external power cord. It doesn't depend on USB power. It won't even power up without the external power cord.

- Trip