SUCCESS !!!!! C-Band RULES !!!
Good Morning Gentlemen! I've got NEWS ... and GOOD NEWS! Being a Newbie, some of my problems were created by not knowing what I was doing
. Anyway, long story short, I've got the Pinnacle aligned and I'm receiving 20 C-Band Sats from 72W - 137W. Nice BIG STRONG SIGNALS (ranging between 70 to 85%). The biggest signals are on 91w, 113w, 131w (those are between 80 to 84). My kids are currently watching Calliou on Sprout HD (131w AMC11). The declination angle on the PM was set to 50 degrees (when I bought it). That was wrong of course. My declination angle is currently set to 35 degrees and it tracks all the sats perfectly). There is allot of slop in the Von Weise (maybe a degree or so). It doesn't cause problems with the C-Band sats, but it sure does with the Ku Band sats (I have to nudge it with the E/W buttons to get the signal to come in). I aligned the BUD to True N/S by setting up on 118.8W Ku AF3 (this is my true south satellite). I used a bubble level on the frame of the PM to insure that it was level at that position. At that position, I reset the V-BOX to 000. Once True North and the Declination Angle was correct, all the sats came in. When I first put the LBNF on, all I could receive was Vertical TP's. This was caused by me not knowing how to set up the LBNF. After fooling around with it for a while and figuring out the proper skew, my scans were showing both V and H TP's. There was some fine tuning of the skew as some of the channels were intermittently freezing. After I was getting all the channels, I slid the Feed Hook in and out to optimize the signal strength. So far, I have only watched one Ku sat on the BUD (125w AMC21). The TP that the main PBS feeds come in on (PBS Pacific, PBS East, etc), came in nice and strong at 70% (just as good as my 90cm dish). I could even pick up OETA ... not bad.
In the beginning I wanted to avoid putting up a BUD. However I listened to what you guys said. Now that it's all said and done, I'm sure that in my case I would have been disappointed with the performance of a 6' dish. Thanks for setting me straight on that. C BAND ROCKS!!! In my opinion, if anyone really wants to get the most out of FTA, they should seriously consider going C-BAND. As you know, there's allot of good stuff on C-Band. There's allot of good channels in the clear, so many in fact that it's gonna take some time to get them all catagorized. I wanted to take pictures of the installation but my wife didn't come home in time, and I was one helper short. So there were no hands left over for the camera. Things went exactly as planned. I set the PM horizontal. Two guys on the ground passed the reflector to me on the patio roof. I secured myself to the top of the pole and the guys just passed the end of the reflector over to me and we just slowly moved it over and lowered it into position. I tightened up the four 1/2" bolts and it was done. Shortly, I'll attach another picture of the BUD, along with an interesting picture I took the other morning.
Again, a big THANKS for your opinions and expert guidance regarding my BUD project. You couldn't find this kind of advice and support anywhere else. I'm SO GLAD that I found this forum :clap
