FTA solution for my RV

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gtinet

gtinet

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Original poster
Jan 7, 2011
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Southern Illinois
Greetings and Happy New Year everyone!

I'm looking for guidance/suggestions about an FTA solution for my fifth wheel. I like the reviews of the GeoSatPro DSR200 and, from what I can tell, the programming available on G19 would be more than enough. My concern is the dish. Can I squeak by with something smaller than 30"? Any ideas on how I could build a non-penetrating folding ground mount that could be stored in the camper while traveling?

Thanks,
Kevin
 
gtinet said:
Greetings and Happy New Year everyone!

I'm looking for guidance/suggestions about an FTA solution for my fifth wheel. I like the reviews of the GeoSatPro DSR200 and, from what I can tell, the programming available on G19 would be more than enough. My concern is the dish. Can I squeak by with something smaller than 30"? Any ideas on how I could build a non-penetrating folding ground mount that could be stored in the camper while traveling?

Thanks,
Kevin
Click to expand...

30" is probably the bare minimum if you want to get a reliable signal on Ku Band. Don't go with anything less than that. As for your mount, I'd go with a tripod. Easy to setup and you can fold it away easily for storage.
 
Do you have a ladder on the Fifth Wheel? If so then a standard wall mount, a piece of plywood, sandbags OR jugs for water weights and a 39 in dish from Satellite AV (or a Primestar) can all be securely fastened to the ladder! The Primestar will hold up much better than the metal dishes.
The Glorystar mount can be adjusted to be plumb very easily which makes settup oh SO EASY if the dish does not get bent or warped... The SatelliteAV / Glorystar dish with the LNB arm braces are a great help.

How often do you plan on using the RV and how long do you plan on staying in one spot? Do you want to set up every time you stop for the night - or day for that matter? If you use a board, depending on the dish, you may be able to slide the setup through the door as you get ready to leave and have it the first thing you pull out when you make a stop. with levels on the board or a post level on the pipe, set up to signal lockcan be a 5 minute task, especially if you only travel a few hundred miles a day.

As I have noted in several other threads, RVing and FTA is a lot of fun. I will go back to the Primestar dish and mount with a 1 inch plywood base on my next trip. Ladder and roof mounts are a little too dangerous and way too hard to adjust. I may also go back to my old carbdoard protractor as usually you can find a true N-S or E-W property line or road to line up on. Then finding the direction from the charts is all you need to begin the alignment.

Here I go telling you everything you do not want to know..... Hitting real close to 200,000 miles and way too many setups to count in the RV.
 
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Whatever RV1pop says, goes. He's the man who travels most with FTA on this forum (so far as I know).

Would like to put a bug in your ear for two things that might help:

- the molded dishes may survive rugged handling better than a stamped steel dish.
You'll know them by their little ribs molded into the back side of the dish.
Might not be a significant worry.
These are mostly surplus commercial dishes, you won't find many available new for FTA.

- an elliptical dish (quite wide, but not so tall) will usually perform much like a round dish with a diameter equal the width of the elliptical... for many situations...!
There aren't really any (serious) such dishes offered in the FTA market, but a surplus commercial dish may be elliptical.
If you find one to your liking, be sure it has the original feedhorn (and maybe LNB) to match the shape of the dish.
After market LNBFs are mostly all made for round dishes.

If this post makes no sense, don't worry.
Eventually you'll understand... just by looking around at what others have/use. ;)
 
bruin95, freezy, rv1pop, Anole

Thanks to all for your replies! In a previous life I had a Primestar dealership and then a Dish dealership so most of what you guys are saying makes perfect sense. I wish I had saved a Primestar dish or two....

We take one long trip (10 days) per year and several three day weekends. We usually get to the campground, set-up, then stay put. I thought about the ladder install and I also have a large steel shelf on the back of my unit but with those mounting spots I would always have to make sure I had clear southern LOS from the rear. That leaves me with tripod or plywood and I'm leaning toward plywood. Especially for my first attempt at this.

I'd like to start out with a 30" dish and see how it does. Winegard DS2076 maybe? With the intention of eventually replacing that with a formed/fiberglass dish. Primestar? If I come across a fiberglass dish how do I know if it has the right kind of LNB or if it will accept the correct replacement LNB and which LNB I should buy?

Thanks again for all your help.
 
Oh, you know Primestar!
Good stuff. Now, if you just had a 75e (?), you'd be good to go, I'll bet!
Well, an 84e would be killer, but you might not like carrying it around. ;)

As for feedhorn, below are a couple of designs you would see on elliptical dishes.
If they were for round dishes, the feed would be round.
These first are kind of V-shaped, and the last three are tall and narrow:
 

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I don't recall any of our Primestar installs requiring a switch but that was 15(?) years ago...Too many lost hairs and braincells.

Thanks for all the feedback guys!
 
How wide is your door? For what your are doing, the package I would do is the Glorystar complete system with the DVR as you mentioned. It is the best matched system for the best price. Mount the post on plywood which would be the just narrow enough to go thru the door, tipping as needed. When you travel, you may have to remove the 4 bolts that hold the dish on the mast --- not the bracket from the post --- to clear and put the assembly through the door. Then the assembly on site will take just a minute or two and two gallon jugs of water on the board (water is free and empty jugs are light weight) to keep it from blowing away, help from Dishpointer to aim the dish at the bird, your inclinometer on the LNB arm, using the elevation angle that you prevoiously have measured the diference from the home set up, (for mine with the dish I am now using I think add 3 1/2 ° to the elevation on the list , the figure is on a label on the arm), aiming should be less than 5 minutes. BTW the tuning that works best for me is to set to TBN channel and hit the signal button. The beeps briing me in usually in less then 45 seconds with the the plywood and mount setup, and the final tune may take another 2 or 3 mins to set tune exact elevation and azmuth and skew.

If you go to the same campgrounds, a chart of your settings marked on the plywood base is a great timesaver! I have traveled 2700 mile so far on this trip, but have only set up four times as the ladder mount is way too hard (and unsafe) to use quickly. That makes 6 one night stops with no TV! Only 2 more months to go. Oh, yes, we do not usually do campgrounds, road side stops and parking lots do not lend themselves well to base mounted dishes which is why I was trying the ladder mount, and yes, the primestar uses a multiswitch which I use one input to the inside setup and a second input for the portable alignment setup out by the dish. That means only one cable to swap to after getting the dish aligned.
 
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I appreciate the great detail rv1pop. I like your thoughts and we're definitely on the same page. In situations where I have clear sight to the south I can bungee the plywood base to the shelf on the rear of my camper. If not, placing it on the ground with some water jug ballast will work well. Most of our trips are to the same two campgrounds so making a log of the site specific settings is an excellent idea. I never thought about doing that.

I'm still leaning toward the 30" dish vs. the 36" one that is included in the Glorystar package. Sometimes, as you probably know, an extra 6 inches in the RV world might as well be 6 feet when it comes to conserving space. I'll measure my door tonight and see what would reasonably fit. Pulling my slides in for travel doesn't leave much floor space either.

I know I would have to manually realign the dish, but occasionally I would like to be able to pick up content from G18, AMC9 or AMC21. Can I do that with this setup?
 
My experience with my 36/39 inch GeoSAT vs a 30 dish in So.Cal. just opposite the Queen Mary. I set up my dish in about 22 minutes to good lock. The neighbor wasted Daystar also so I helped him to get the almost lock on his 30". Using my setup as a sighting guide we started to get a flicker after 35 minutes, finallly got a lock on TBN in another ten. We went to Daystar and got a lock until an RV went by on the road North of the campsite and the vibration knock him off lock! He only got 25 or so channels, I had over 120. Every time a vehicle went by, he lost enough signal to drop out, but it usually came back. Each setup was on the campsite's picnic tables. Now the best part! On the way back to Washington, I stopped at Satellite AV in Sacramento and got a new LNB arm, because mine was bent. Mynext try at setting up went quicker AND I had over 200 channels!
Are all 30" dishes the same? Will your results vary? For my vacations I want the best signal in the shortest amount of time. SO, even though it means removing the LNBF arm, tacking the dish off the mount, trying the dish FIRMLY to the ladder with at least 2 ropes, and puting the arm on the bed (not a good sleeping partner); I will travel with the Primestar 75E The GeoSAT would be lighter and easier, but since we move for 12 days out of 30, The extrra work has proven worth it.

In every 5th wheel I have looked at there is at least 36 inches of floor space just inside one door even when the slides are in, otherwise, is there room under the dinette? In our motorhomes, that space is reserved for the dogs and cats! Hmmm, is there room for the plywood in front of the Propane tanks and under the tub for the dish? Just looked at a 5th wheel... But it looks like the LNBF arm would have to come off the dish to slide it under the tub. Again, without the pipe bracket on the back of the dish, the dish might fit between the ladder and the back of the RV.

Oh, yes, on this ltrip, all the way from Rock Springs WY to CC Texas, the dish set next to the driver's seat. Too much snow and ice to try to get it on the ladder - too dangerous to try to mount the dish, also.

One other thing, if you buy a 39" dish and decide you want a smaller one, trading or selling it to downsize should be easy. Trading a 30" dish for a larger one may not be as easy! But, then, you could just get a larger 5th Wheel!!!!
 
All good points rv1pop. Your experience speaks volumes. Wish I had a chance to read your last reply before I ordered from Sadoun. You would have convinced me to go with at least a 36. I've got 10 weeks before my first trip, which should give me plenty of time to tinker before I leave. If set-up is too difficult or time consuming with the 31 I'll get a 36.

Of course a bigger fifth wheel sounds good too. I already have "two-foot-itis". Extra room for a dish may be just the excuse I need to visit the RV dealer.
 
I just got a call from Sadoun Satellite. She said they're sending me a 90cm dish instead of the 80 as a free upgrade. Not sure why but I'll take it. :up
 
I have a 33' travel trailer. I use a 30" dish with sg1000 motor & pansat3500 @ the house. I live on a mountain and years back, the only internet I could get was direcway (hughes). When it was installed, they had provided a heavy duty roof mount for the dish, but never used it. It measures about 34" long, depending on how you measure it, and is designs to adjust it for different angles of roofs. It has two telescoping support poles on each side that really support the dish. I mounted it on the side of my travel trailer (making sure I hit one of the aluminum wall studs) and installed an outdoor 75 ohm jack outside. Inside, opposite where I installed it, is a kitchen cabinet with an inside and outside bottom with a couple inches in between. I had a 75 ohm jack on the bottom side of the cabinet nearby, so I installed another 75 ohm jack on the inside of the cabinet. The jack I installed on the inside of the cabinet, I wired & soldiered into the 75 ohm wiring system in the trailer. The outside jack is ran into the cabinet with regular screw connector on the end.

Ok, back to the roof mount, it is 2" id, with a carriage hole in it for the dish. I whacked off my dish mounted in the the yard with a saws all, leaving 6" of the pole on the dish, went to autozone and bought a exhaust pipe adapter that slipped into each piece, easily but snuggly to reconnect the dish back to my home pole. I inserted the muffle adapter into dish portion, drilled 2 holes thru and secured tightly with two bolts. Then drilled holes in bottom portion of muffler adapter to line up with holes on roof mount. I took the bolts for the bottom potion and drilled a hole thru the carriage bolts themselves so I could push a spring key or carter key thru it. Did the same for pole at home. I travel and stay gone a lot, so what I do, is pull the pins, unscrew 75 ohm cable from house to motor, throw the dish/motor in trailer and take off. When I get there, make sure I have trailer level (front to back) and drop it into mount, insert pins, connect cable from motor to outside jack on trailer, loosen couple bolts on roof mount and dish motor to adjust elevation. I use a tom tom gps in travels, find my long and lat, plug them into receiver, use receiver to point to sat I want and fine tune....works awesome for me, but this is just the quick run down....lol

Also, if you want something very simple, I know of a place that actually sells domes for rv that are actually only ku band, but not sure of features or limitations....hope this helps!!
 
Anytime gtinet, also converted my lp hot water heater to use either lp or 110 electric....Now working on building my own solar panels now, so can park anywhere and have all the electric comforts without using lp, using 12v deep cycle batteries and 8000 watt inverter....love to tinker...give me a good shot at the southern sky, free electric, free heat/air, free hot water and lights, and FREE TV!!! lol
 
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