LOL! I started to yank what's left of my hair so I called it a day and will start fresh tomorrow or I'll smash everything! LOL!
Newbie needs guidance!
- Thread starter rimichael
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On your downtime, READ, READ, READ! Maybe look up some other Youtube videos on USALS motor installs. Get all of this stuff in your head, and let your head start working on it thinking about it.
How To Install a USALS Motor - Condensed Version
How to install a USALS Motor A Condensed Guide By Michael Graves, KE4EST 1. First and very important. Make absolutely sure your pole or mast is plumb. You can get away with a mast that is off a little when only aiming at one satellite for a fixed dish, but NOT with a motor used for...
www.satelliteguys.us
View: https://youtu.be/ZTgsdmqe8v8
View: https://youtu.be/mX1mmq42oaM
View: https://youtu.be/3Qzr4M3yYOI
View: https://youtu.be/KWh7nhMaLyU
re set just the a/b on the dish motor and and moving the whole assembly on the motor post and not hitting anything. Will tweak the dish angle and keep trying.
IF the motor is on the pole pointed TRUE South, and the dish is mounted on the motor centered, all you have to do is TELL the receiver to go to 97W. It'll spin to where it THINKS 97W is, which is where USALS says it is. That means at that point, ALL you should have to do is slightly adjust Azimuth and/or Elevation slightly to tune in a usable signal.
You KNOW everything works from being pole mounted, so it isn't that hard now, you are overthinking it.
Totally agree. If your pole is perfectly plumb and your dish is perfectly centered on the motor shaft and your dish elevation is set correctly for the motor and your motor assembly is pointed directly at true south then motoring over to a sat should only require a small amount of adjustment either up/down/left/right to acquire signal. Take a break. Come back and double check everything afterwards then try again.
I had no luck. I'm done for the day. I'll start tomorrow and check everything. When the dish spun to 97w it got the other sat instead. I have to look to see if the receiver can be defaulted to 180 true south so I can set everything up again.Totally agree. If your pole is perfectly plumb and your dish is perfectly centered on the motor shaft and your dish elevation is set correctly for the motor and your motor assembly is pointed directly at true south then motoring over to a sat should only require a small amount of adjustment either up/down/left/right to acquire signal. Take a break. Come back and double check everything afterwards then try again.
Yes, because your azimuth setting for true south is WRONG. When it gets "the wrong satellite, though pointed for 97W" you NEED to loosen the motor bolts a hair, and SPIN the entire motor assembly in whatever direction 97W is! Either East or West, depending on whatever "that satellite" is that you are picking up. IF the sat is 101W, then you spin the motor towards the EAST a few degrees. At that point, you'll also likely need to slightly RAISE elevation so the dish points a hair higher.
It's so simple now, and you just keep fighting it. STOP thinking so hard about it, and just follow what we say to do.
Easy there buddy. I am doing the best I can. Remember your first time? Yeah ok. I am going to re-set the entire dish set up in the morning and start by scratch. Starting with verifying everything starting with my pole mount. I broke a dam bolt on the dish so I got to run to the hardware store to replace that. then I will start the whole process over.
Good idea. Like I said before. Take a break and come back later. Fresh eyes often see things that tired ones miss. Definitely not a race. You got it with a stationary setup. You will get it with the motorized one as well. Hang in there and good luck tomorrow!
Still following this and understand the frustration. No way trying to hijack nor distract from the subject.
I've assisted in a few installs and bringing a few c-band dishes back to life. Including my own.
Mine was setup and functioning when retired. I got all the electronics needed to make it work again.
It has a true polar mount and has tracked the arc rather well. Of note. I have not seen nor touched a usals drive.
I asked if the OP's working pole mount geometry could be documented.
It was because of the differences in dish antenna mfg. and if the elevation in charts said for example 26 degrees but to get an actual good signal ended up with 22.5 or maybe 28 degrees. I feel that this is very important. Very.
I've recently lost 131W. I only get it in the winter after leaves fall. Besides very slight seasonal declination adjustments and tiny elevation adjustments to get the dish to track correctly. It was assumed that the original installer in the early 80's did it right. Before digital gauges were affordable. Good old bubble levels were used.
But I always had to lift the dish rim at the lower sats either W (122W-131W) or way over to 55W .
The rim had to be pulled down a touch at the higher zenith sats.
But I never wanted to screw up the setup by making wildly blind tweaks.
Okay. Still have your attention?
Yesterday I took my digital angle gauge and measured elevation and declination.
True N-S was spot on. I unhooked my motor and manually drove the dish to zenith.
Elevation was 46 degrees and declination was 49 degrees.
Dropped my cursor on Google Earth and came up with a H-M-S location. Converted it to decimal.
My latitude is 41.5 degrees. Looking at the charts my compensated declination for it is a extrapolated 5.8ish degrees.
Fingers crossed. Dropped the elevation to 41.5 degrees. Added the 5.8 declination degrees and set the mount at 47.3 degrees. Locked it all down with big doubts. Hand cranked the dish down to 127W (my go-to setup sat with a bitchin' signal!). As I cranked it down, a few signal bars on my phone app popped up from other sats using the same transponder frequencies with high dB levels. Things were looking good. At 127 the signal was awesome. In bad weather.
Now I found I needed to push the dish rim down a touch for the highest dB levels. And the same for every sat I had in the arc.
So with a very few minute tweaks to even out tracking from the posted tracking assistance diagrams here. Its about as good as it gets. I do not have 131W coming in yet. It's weather related.
Sorry. Use your gourd and use the diagrams. Just because the azimuth charts said to set the dish at 25 degrees for whatever sat. and your pole was perfectly plumb. You should have made a note that the actual final setting was for example 23.5 degrees. There's your offset error of the dish in the stamped markings.
The usals motor HAS to be initially setup and your dish pointing true south with the motor exactly at zero.
With all of the conflusteration I would put the motor drive in go-to mode and figure out where my first sat is.
91W in your case because you know where it is now.
Then bump it a little and raise/lower the dish rim by hand to see if you could grab a signal on a good, strong transponder on the next sat you are trying to find. That would tell you a whole bunch of the geometry setup.
Sorry. I hate stabbing in the dark, yanking hair out, and all that crap.
Didn't mean to butt in.
I've assisted in a few installs and bringing a few c-band dishes back to life. Including my own.
Mine was setup and functioning when retired. I got all the electronics needed to make it work again.
It has a true polar mount and has tracked the arc rather well. Of note. I have not seen nor touched a usals drive.
I asked if the OP's working pole mount geometry could be documented.
It was because of the differences in dish antenna mfg. and if the elevation in charts said for example 26 degrees but to get an actual good signal ended up with 22.5 or maybe 28 degrees. I feel that this is very important. Very.
I've recently lost 131W. I only get it in the winter after leaves fall. Besides very slight seasonal declination adjustments and tiny elevation adjustments to get the dish to track correctly. It was assumed that the original installer in the early 80's did it right. Before digital gauges were affordable. Good old bubble levels were used.
But I always had to lift the dish rim at the lower sats either W (122W-131W) or way over to 55W .
The rim had to be pulled down a touch at the higher zenith sats.
But I never wanted to screw up the setup by making wildly blind tweaks.
Okay. Still have your attention?
Yesterday I took my digital angle gauge and measured elevation and declination.
True N-S was spot on. I unhooked my motor and manually drove the dish to zenith.
Elevation was 46 degrees and declination was 49 degrees.
Dropped my cursor on Google Earth and came up with a H-M-S location. Converted it to decimal.
My latitude is 41.5 degrees. Looking at the charts my compensated declination for it is a extrapolated 5.8ish degrees.
Fingers crossed. Dropped the elevation to 41.5 degrees. Added the 5.8 declination degrees and set the mount at 47.3 degrees. Locked it all down with big doubts. Hand cranked the dish down to 127W (my go-to setup sat with a bitchin' signal!). As I cranked it down, a few signal bars on my phone app popped up from other sats using the same transponder frequencies with high dB levels. Things were looking good. At 127 the signal was awesome. In bad weather.
Now I found I needed to push the dish rim down a touch for the highest dB levels. And the same for every sat I had in the arc.
So with a very few minute tweaks to even out tracking from the posted tracking assistance diagrams here. Its about as good as it gets. I do not have 131W coming in yet. It's weather related.
Sorry. Use your gourd and use the diagrams. Just because the azimuth charts said to set the dish at 25 degrees for whatever sat. and your pole was perfectly plumb. You should have made a note that the actual final setting was for example 23.5 degrees. There's your offset error of the dish in the stamped markings.
The usals motor HAS to be initially setup and your dish pointing true south with the motor exactly at zero.
With all of the conflusteration I would put the motor drive in go-to mode and figure out where my first sat is.
91W in your case because you know where it is now.
Then bump it a little and raise/lower the dish rim by hand to see if you could grab a signal on a good, strong transponder on the next sat you are trying to find. That would tell you a whole bunch of the geometry setup.
Sorry. I hate stabbing in the dark, yanking hair out, and all that crap.
Didn't mean to butt in.
Thank you for the input. This is one of the reasons I want to start over and verify everything as well as all my calculations. I value each and every persons input even if it telling me I'm an idiot if I deserve it. Trust me I would have rather not spent 8 hours in the cold rain and today 4 1/2 hours getting a tan up on the especially when I took a backwards fall from an 8 ft ladder at 56 years old and disabled. This old man didn't bounce much ! LOL! My frekin back is still killing me. I will get everything zero'd out and start new. I have to read up on how to get the motor to re-center then every thing else is easy. I let everyone know how its going.
Ok so after thinking a bit I realize that there must be something fundamentally wrong with my rig setup. I checked my pole and what do you know... the damm things off.! I stripped the pole of the dish and what happened was when I drilled the hole and then tighten it up somehow I thought it was plum and level. Not so. In the morning I am remounting the support arms with the pole level and setting the rig up again and see if that helps. Man what a pain in the [---]!
Not to get us off topic, but yes. If you go by 36MHz transponders, and consider only 200MHz of C band spectrum will remain, it divides into 5.5 transponders per polarity. That doesn't account for the guard bandwidth. So, I figure only 10 transponders per satellite. Some may have more than that will narrow signals like the MeTV and other networks on 101w. All boils down the same really. The use of HEVC and higher modulation like 16 and 32APSK will be the only thing that will keep the channel numbers up. That of course requires bigger dishes.
Not much on talking about things I don't know about. EB has given me tidbits on the subject. From blindscans I'm seeing more and more multistream transponders. Although not sure if anything on them is FTA nor how to segregate a channel if there were any. More and more receivers are touting being multistream capable.
So basically it looks like what in the early days we had 12 H & 12 V transponders per satellite with a single channel on each. And now many more channels on a tp. Or, as I've dug up a little info.
-
Multistream is a main advantage of the DVB-S2 standard that allows users to aggregate a number of independent transport streams or IP streams into one satellite carrier in a fully transparent manner, maintaining the integrity of the original content.
At the transmit side, the individual input streams are divided in User Packets. The User Packets of one stream are all part of baseband frames which have the same Input Stream Identifier (ISI) in their header. The baseband frames of all streams are merged and transmitted after encoding.
At the receive side, streams are reconstructed by separation based upon the ISI values in the baseband headers.
-
Benefits of Multistream
- No need for re-multiplexing at the towers
- 1-4 multiplexes distribution with only 1 Receiver (e.g. compared with 4 IRDs!)
- Less satellite bandwidth needed compared with DVB-S
- Distribution of multiple services (terrestrial TV and IP) in a single carrier.
- Ability to saturate the transponder gaining up to 12% bandwidth above gain brought by DVB-S2
- Single Frequency Network (SFN) compliant
- Lower number of frequencies necessary
- Fully interoperable, transparent and compliant with the DVB-S2 standard
- Applications include primary distribution of digital terrestrial TV (DTT) and DSNG contributions where one or more video channels are combined with IP-based services
-
-
Tech Brief
Tech Brief Multistream
-
Multistream is a main advantage of the DVB-S2 standard that allows users to aggregate a number of independent transport streams or IP streams into one satellite carrier in a fully transparent manner, maintaining the integrity of the original content.
At the transmit side, the individual input streams are divided in User Packets. The User Packets of one stream are all part of baseband frames which have the same Input Stream Identifier (ISI) in their header. The baseband frames of all streams are merged and transmitted after encoding.
At the receive side, streams are reconstructed by separation based upon the ISI values in the baseband headers.
-
Benefits of Multistream
- No need for re-multiplexing at the towers
- 1-4 multiplexes distribution with only 1 Receiver (e.g. compared with 4 IRDs!)
- Less satellite bandwidth needed compared with DVB-S
- Distribution of multiple services (terrestrial TV and IP) in a single carrier.
- Ability to saturate the transponder gaining up to 12% bandwidth above gain brought by DVB-S2
- Single Frequency Network (SFN) compliant
- Lower number of frequencies necessary
- Fully interoperable, transparent and compliant with the DVB-S2 standard
- Applications include primary distribution of digital terrestrial TV (DTT) and DSNG contributions where one or more video channels are combined with IP-based services
-
-
Tech Brief
Tech Brief Multistream
That's all pretty cool, but lets not hijack his thread anymore with stuff like that. At least until he actually gets his USALS system all installed and working.
We are already on page 13, and he's not there yet.
We are already on page 13, and he's not there yet.
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