need advice prior to purchase

[Skyscanner]

I thought I read some posts somewhere a while back where it sounds like some of you have used a laptop and some sort of pc card to fine tune your dishes. That sounds exactly like what I want to do instead of dragging a receiver and TV out to the site. I wouldn't mind so much if I only had 1 or 2 dishes up, but I have 5 up now and will be adding another 3 over the coming summer. I don't have the patience to wait for a motorized system to move and have the acreage needed for a farm, so I have everything on switches.

Can you offer some advice on what card to buy? How do they connect to the PC, and do they need a separate power supply, or are they supplied by the PC? Do they have a quality meter that displays on the PC? Does the LNB connect directly to the card? What's your opinion on their effectiveness? Those kind of questions.
Thank you all for your input,
Sky

 

[AcWxRadar]

I thought I read some posts somewhere a while back where it sounds like some of you have used a laptop and some sort of pc card to fine tune your dishes. That sounds exactly like what I want to do instead of dragging a receiver and TV out to the site. I wouldn't mind so much if I only had 1 or 2 dishes up, but I have 5 up now and will be adding another 3 over the coming summer. I don't have the patience to wait for a motorized system to move and have the acreage needed for a farm, so I have everything on switches.

Can you offer some advice on what card to buy? How do they connect to the PC, and do they need a separate power supply, or are they supplied by the PC? Do they have a quality meter that displays on the PC? Does the LNB connect directly to the card? What's your opinion on their effectiveness? Those kind of questions.
Thank you all for your input,
Sky

SkyScanner,

Most of the cards that you are hearing about will fit into a tower type of PC box. probably not a laptop. You want to haul a tower PC out to your dish?

LOL

I may be wrong, there are always newitems to play with, but I don't think that this is one of those times.

Radar

 

[brentb636]

The PCI cards are terrible for tuning dishes, anyway. There's no direct SQ feedback ( signal meter) associated with them, the way there IS with a stb. If you took out a small battery powered TV set, and had a spare cable ( or borrowed one from an lnbf), you could do it by feeding the signal meter our to the dishfarm on channel 3 or 4.

 

[starman345]

I can't see how doing what you propose would be very convenient. You can't put a dvb card in a laptop so that leaves you with a usb device, or maybe firewire. I have the Dvbworld Dvb-s2 USB, just plugs into any usb port, but then it is powered by a wall wart so you would need to drag a power source to your dishes. Once you get everything hooked up you will find the dvb software programs leave a lot to be desired in the signal/quality meter department. None of them are very responsive, at least the type of responsiveness you would need to tweak a dish.
I have a few cheap signal meters here but usually I just take a receiver and small tv to the dish to do any signal tweaking.
If you are serious about persuing your idea, get a trial copy of Fast Satfinder, its probably the best I've seen for what you want to do

 

[Skyscanner]

OK, I must have somehow gotten the wrong idea from what I was reading, easy to do because I don't know much about it, but it seemed like the person whose post I was reading said something about taking their laptop up on his roof to tweak his dish. I must be mistaken. Thanks.

 

[USDownlink]

Well, it doesn't have to end there. There might be other creative ways to solve the problem. I'll share one that I used a while ago - STB to an NTSC capture card in the desktop PC. VLC server on the desktop to stream the video wirelessly to the laptop. The best part was I had the NTSC card already - nothing to buy in order to have dish-side video. An IR-RF remote extender let me change channels/TP settings, too, while sitting out with the dish.

 

[Tron]

I think most people using a laptop for aiming a dish are not using the laptop itself as a tuner. As USDownlink said, they're probably using it to receive video from another source. DVB cards, whether PCI or USB, are next to impossible to use for aiming purposes.

 

[Mr Tony]

what's wrong with the TV & Receiver?

in the garage I have a 19" TV on a cart when I aim the C-Band dish and use a 9" TV for the other dish farm

 

[AcWxRadar]

what's wrong with the TV & Receiver?

in the garage I have a 19" TV on a cart when I aim the C-Band dish and use a 9" TV for the other dish farm

That sounds awfully familiar! What brand of cart are you using? LOL!



Radar

 

[Anole]

None of the PCI nor USB FTA receivers have blind scan.
That's probably the most useful feature in a tune-up receiver.

Although somewhat complicated and expensive, USdownlink's idea probably works the best.
Well, if that's what you want.
Just don't drop your laptop off the roof.

You could possibly also connect a modulator to an antenna, and broadcast to just a portable TV set.
That's not technically legal, and I couldn't guarantee success, but it's another avenue.

Carrying a big TV set and STB out back is obviously a pain.
So, I took a page out of Linuxman's procedure, and use an LCD DVD player.
It has an external video (and audio) input, so acts as a monitor to a Mercury II.
Mine is about 7" size, and that's probably a bare minimum.

 

[AcWxRadar]

Carrying a big TV set and STB out back is obviously a pain.

So, I took a page out of Linuxman's procedure, and use an LCD DVD player. It has an external video (and audio) input, so acts as a monitor to a Mercury II. Mine is about 7" size, and that's probably a bare minimum.

Anole,

That is the practice that my brother and I have adopted as well. The big problem with this is that many LCD displays are not very nicely viewable in the out-doors and especially not in direct sunlight.

In direct sunlight, even a CRT is not especially great either. You really need a small LCD screen with a "hood" of some sort.

Just for playing at home, I do something similar to what Iceman referred to. I set up a table in the garage and run my cables into there to play and experiment. That way I am in the shade at least, but this won't help if you are installing on a roof and especially at someone's residence (unless they are your buddy and you sit and gab about it in the their garage anyway <~ where the beer fridge is). But, it looks odd otherwise.


Radar

 

[linuxman]

You can see my final solution to this problem by following this link to the second page of a thread I started on options for a satellite meter tuner here..

It has served me very well since I built it over a year ago, even in bright sunlight.

It is a little heavy, but not bad.

 

[pendragon]

There's another laptop variant that works for me. I have a Linux machine inside the house controlling a USB box or a PCI card receiver. I bring up X-Windows on my laptop and run the freeware xdipo app on the Linux machine with the window sent over wireless to the laptop. This app shows signal strength, unit-less SNR (ie. SQ), BER and can position motors and tune up transponders remotely. Almost everything I need except a spectrum analyzer. When I want that, I use a video chat with a web camera pointed at the spectrum analyzer.

It turns out xdipo has a number of downsides, like it calculates the wrong motor angle for USALS and doesn't understand DiSEqC switches. I've hacked it to temporarily solve the problems that bother me, but I haven't had time to fix it properly. I'm thinking instead of writing a more general tool.

Lastly on the eccentric side, I would like to pick up a IEEE-488 to Ethernet interface for my spectrum analyzer so I can control it and capture displays remotely from my laptop.

 

[USDownlink]

Lastly on the eccentric side, I would like to pick up a IEEE-488 to Ethernet interface for my spectrum analyzer so I can control it and capture displays remotely from my laptop.

Sweet. May I recommend the ICS Electronics 8065 instead of the NI piece of junk everyone else uses? I use the 8065 for similar purposes, and in my experience it is easier to code for, easier to set up, and even seems faster.

 

[pendragon]

Sweet. May I recommend the ICS Electronics 8065 instead of the NI piece of junk everyone else uses? I use the 8065 for similar purposes, and in my experience it is easier to code for, easier to set up, and even seems faster.

Thanks, the 8065 looks like a great unit but 750 clams is more than I wanted to spend. Instead I've been considering the Prologix controller for around $200.