Is this dish worth saving?
- Thread starter bobvick
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On that motor, the rusty area is under the cover. I will have to take some more pictures in a day or two and post them.
I found these pictures that linuxman had posted on the forum here in 2007. The mount and motor on this Janiel dish, look just like the mount and motor that are on the dish that I harvested. I managed to scratch off where my motor had been painted over and see that the motor was made by Janiel it is a RP180 model. I wonder if Janiel made these for Radio Shack, as the dish looks like a Radio Shack dish. Here is the link for the thread with the pics.
I found out a bit more about this dish yesterday. The man I got it from had me come by yesterday, and he gave me the old original Janiel receiver and positioner that went with it. He also had an old original M/A Com descrambler unit. He thought that he had the instructions for the dish, but could only find the old instructions for the Janiel positioner. Those old receivers and positioners are heavy and built like a tank. He had the old Long's Electronics magazine from Fall 1985 from when he bought it. According to the catalog, it was a bundled system. The dish it says is a 9' made by a company called Seer. It was $1,095 in 1985. Came with a 120 degree Amplica LNA. He gave me the old catalog, it has some neat old equipment in it. I will have to scan it some time and post the scans so anyone can see some of this old stuff from the 80's.
Yes, please do.
I didn't dabble in the hobby back then, but it's still fun finding all the old adverts and documentation for was was often very well built equipment! - :up
As for the original Janiel positioner/controller, you might get it going with that.
One of our members got a very old actuator, and instead of converting it to reed switch, found the original controller, hooked up the existing pot, and is running that way now.
Nothing at all wrong with saving the reed-switch conversion to a later date.
Just get the tank running.
You can clean the plugs and boil out the carburetor later.
No the Rat Shack one was a copy & a POS. It had a bunch of plastic crap in it the warped badly. This one like like the 9 ft Janeil stamped perf. Either sting the button hook or even better get 4 pieces of conduit and go to the edge for a quad pod feed. IIRC it was an f/d of .4 and being 9 ft had a beam width of less than 2 deg image rejection.
Gonna disagree w/ you on the conversion. The pot positioners had drift problems in nearly all cases (due to it "counted" via resistance and length of wire could cause problems). I converted a bunch of birdview pot to reeds as they had some of the worse drift problems and dropped the use of the pots themselves.Yes, please do.
I didn't dabble in the hobby back then, but it's still fun finding all the old adverts and documentation for was was often very well built equipment! - :up
As for the original Janiel positioner/controller, you might get it going with that.
One of our members got a very old actuator, and instead of converting it to reed switch, found the original controller, hooked up the existing pot, and is running that way now.
Nothing at all wrong with saving the reed-switch conversion to a later date.
Just get the tank running.
You can clean the plugs and boil out the carburetor later.
That brings back nightmares. That was the better dish like the one here. The receiver was a Uniden that was guaranteed to fry the positioner from heat. Uniden later redid the model so that the positioner box was in a separate unit.
This looks like the same dish that I have, which I bought new from Rat Shack. The panels themselves won't rust because they're aluminum. Despite some other comments here, it's a pretty good dish.
The one exception is the worm gear. It's made of some kind of plastic composite. You really have to keep it greased. Mine has never broken, but it wore to the point that there was a lot of slop when pointing to the western birds. Mainly because the 4DTV was moving it to "G1" for nightly downloads.
I looked for a metal replacement. I even looked through piles of flywheels in the salvage yard for one with the same pitch & diameter. I probably looked at over a hundred flywheels... no luck. So I contacted some machine shops to see about getting one custom made from something like brass or aluminum, no luck there either. Apparently the gear style is rather non-standard.
I ended up flipping the gear over to the other side. This was no picnic either. The gear mount was not reversible without drilling out each hole and making a spacer for each bolt. But I got it done. The good thing is that the gear has a wide surface and the worm only rides in the upper half. So when I flipped it, the worm now rides in the other half, which is not worn out. But if it ever breaks, I'll just get a custom made pair and rig the mount. It's a lot easier to find a replacement for the pair, than it is to match one half.
Also, if the motor ever becomes an issue, it would be simple enough to modify the mount where it connects to the worm. Then you could use a standard motor made for an arm.
Other than dealing with the odd H-H gear, this dish has performed nicely for me. The perf aluminum panels have very nice gain. My numbers have always been good for both C & Ku. BTW, the flatness of the dish is a little bit of an illusion in those pics. In person, it looks deeper.
One more thing, I wouldn't scrap this dish because of bent panels. They are made of nice and workable material. Any good sheet-metal man can straighten them right up.
The one exception is the worm gear. It's made of some kind of plastic composite. You really have to keep it greased. Mine has never broken, but it wore to the point that there was a lot of slop when pointing to the western birds. Mainly because the 4DTV was moving it to "G1" for nightly downloads.
I looked for a metal replacement. I even looked through piles of flywheels in the salvage yard for one with the same pitch & diameter. I probably looked at over a hundred flywheels... no luck. So I contacted some machine shops to see about getting one custom made from something like brass or aluminum, no luck there either. Apparently the gear style is rather non-standard.
I ended up flipping the gear over to the other side. This was no picnic either. The gear mount was not reversible without drilling out each hole and making a spacer for each bolt. But I got it done. The good thing is that the gear has a wide surface and the worm only rides in the upper half. So when I flipped it, the worm now rides in the other half, which is not worn out. But if it ever breaks, I'll just get a custom made pair and rig the mount. It's a lot easier to find a replacement for the pair, than it is to match one half.
Also, if the motor ever becomes an issue, it would be simple enough to modify the mount where it connects to the worm. Then you could use a standard motor made for an arm.
Other than dealing with the odd H-H gear, this dish has performed nicely for me. The perf aluminum panels have very nice gain. My numbers have always been good for both C & Ku. BTW, the flatness of the dish is a little bit of an illusion in those pics. In person, it looks deeper.
One more thing, I wouldn't scrap this dish because of bent panels. They are made of nice and workable material. Any good sheet-metal man can straighten them right up.
I have not tried to run the motor, but the gear on this one looks to be in pretty good shape. It is all gummed up right now with old hardened grease. I piddled a bit and cleaned some of it off with a toothbrush and some WD40, it comes off pretty easy. I was trying to remove the button hook the other day, and the set screw down where it hooks in was rusted real bad and broke. I guess I will have to try and drill that bolt out, and then tap out the hole and get a new bolt and put in there. I am just going to leave the dish together and spray on some rusty metal primer, the kind that has a chemical reaction with the rust. I suppose that when I get to the point that I am going to re attach the button hook, I might need to get it centered real well and put 3 or 4 guy wires on it.
Did you have to convert that motor to a reed sensor type design? I read on here in a previous post that I might have to do that.
Did you have to convert that motor to a reed sensor type design? I read on here in a previous post that I might have to do that.
Nope, mine is still original & going strong. But the gear thing was what got me thinking about "what if" concerning the motor. Looks like converting to a standard mount wouldn't be too hard... if ever needed.
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