It's overcast and sprinkling rain today, but besides that a good day for tinkering. I had the brilliant idea of using my skywalker-1 to fine tune my Merc II USALS settings, and it works just fine. The skywalker-1 coupled with Tsreader give me a Signal/Noise meter which is more sensitive than the meter on the Merc II. Turns out that I have to "lie" in my USALS setting by 0.4 degrees longitude to maximize my Q and SNR . The adjustment appears to be effective across the arc ( checked on 74W and 123W ) . Looks like I'll be outside on a nice fall day trying to correct the error at the pole, but 'til then, Tsreader and the skywalker are my best temporary weapon.
I've found usals to be off .3 or .4 degrees despite all my efforts to be accurate. I was tuning around last week and dicovered my skywalker would tune the pbs 12180 mux when my Coolsat 5000 wouldn't, it could barely hold it but the Coolsat wouldn't lock it at all. The skywalker seems to have a very nice tuner in it.
