We finally had a 50-degree afternoon and all of the ice and snow are gone from the rooftops. I got a wild hair to throw up a temporary antenna on my flat roof, above the 2nd floor apartment that I rent in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, for my job at Skyvision. Knew it would be possible, because 14 years ago in Grand Forks, I was able to use an 8.5 foot Orbitron Micromesh antenna to clear a 6.5 degree elevation angle just over a flood control dike, and achieve excellent analog reception form Hispasat. That neighborhood was destroyed by flooding in 1997.
Fergus Falls is 125 miles to the south and east, with a 7.5 degree elevation, and about +1 dB more signal than Grand Forks...a whopping nominal +45 dBw.
My first bag of tricks solution was to take a cheap run of the mill 90 cm offset dish and flip it upside down so that the LNBF was on top of the dish. Where a "normal" offset Ku band installation ends up with the dish pointing 15 degrees into the ground, the flip-over solution gives me a physical dish elevation of about 37 degrees. (Add a 22 degree offset angle twice = 44 degrees, and subtract 7.5 degrees to get the 37 degree resulting elevation).
The flip over solves the problem that many offset antennas have in not being able to get satellites with true elevations under 10 degrees. The reflector pointing in the 35 to 40 degree elevation instead of into the ground means that you pick up less terrestrial noise from the ground. It will catch more snow in the winter, but it does not get hung up on the mount. Quality reading on a Super Buddy was 69-70on the Cuba MUX, and was in the low 60s on most of the Spanish MUXES (12132, 12172). Considering that this was a flimsy 36 inch offset, I was impressed. You should do at least as well with ANY 90 cm offset antenna, and I would also suggest acceptable results with 75 and 84 cm Primestar elliptical antennas.
Just make sure that you rotate the LNBF about -40 degrees to match the skew before attempting to find the satellite.