Smallest Possible Ku Dish

[Cascade]

I am a college student, so price is always an issue. Where can I find the best price for stuff like this? Ebay? The sticky deal?

A 30" dish is great for FTA, you'll be surprised at what you can receive with it.

Would a universal LNB be the best?

I am mainly intersted in picking up news feeds and foreign stations. I see all the frequencies for all the various channels on the sats, will a universal LNB cover all of the Ku band stations i want to see?

If you go for a standard Ku LNB it'll pick up everything you can hope to receive, I'm not sure you need the extended frequency range of a universal Ku LNB

What kind of range from the south sat to either side could be expected, like 30 degrees in each direction? So like 80 degrees to 140 degrees would be in my "range" of sats? I am not sure quite how the positioning works.............

The SG2100 has a 140degree arc, so anything 70 degrees east or west of your true south bird is good.

When a sat says it is "111.1W", what is that based on? Would i am the 111.1 degrees plus magnitic deviation to aquire that sat?

The 111.1W sat is at 111.1W in the Clarke Belt, all the geostationary TV sats appear stationary in this belt, it's a ring of satellites around the earth and looks like this (But curved)

EAST_HORIZON--sat1---sat2---sat3---sat4---sat5-sat6-sat7---sat8-sat9----sat10----WEST_HORIZON

Here's a better diagram:

The satellites appear to stand still in relationship to the Earth because they're geostationary, you can't see a satellite lower than your horizon, or if trees are in the way.

To figure out where your dish need to be pointed you'll need to know your Latitude and Longitude and use a calculator such as

http://www.csgnetwork.com/antennasatelazposcalc.html

If I was in CA, Riverside and I wanted to look at Telstar5@97W I'd swing my dish to 146.4Az and 44.8El , the motor would do this automatically.
There's also a magnetic deviation chart lower down the page.

 

[ckudrna]

Anyone have any luck mounting to a tripod or other similar type of mount?

I think this may be the best wya for me to go about this, As having another dish hanging off of my balcony would not fly too well with the management here.

I am concerned with two things.

1. The overhand off of the balcony, i have to make sure the 30 inch will have clear line of sight.

2. Side to side motion. It is not a huge balcony so i will have to check if i can move side to side sufficently to pick up a good set of birds.

I think my 3 LNB directv dish may move down on the lower part of the balcony railing, down at foot level (i am on the second floor). This would free up the entire top part for side to side motion of an FTA dish.