I've got some left over mesh panels (6 out of 8). Anyone tried using a 10ft dish with only 75% of the available mesh panels? I'm going to try it out and see if it works on at least some of the stronger transponders like gdmx on 99.2w.
If the six panels are in good parabolic shape you should get decent signal. You might try and fill in the missing panel with some screen of some kind to reduce the background noise coming from the empty space on the dish. I doesn't need to be in perfect shape to reduce the noise.