somery's adventure in dish hunting

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somery

SatelliteGuys Pro
Original poster
Sep 30, 2006
292
0
Pasadena, TX
I drive by this 10 foot Sami dish every morning on the 10 minute road to work. Today on the way home I saw it and thought of everyone and their dish hunting. I didn't exactly want the dish itself because I already had one. So I was either looking for a good conversation, or possibly a replacement reciever for my no longer functioning Drake reciever. It took a lot of guts for me to walk up and I passed it by first before turning around and pulling up.

He was a man in his late 60s maybe. I asked if he still used it all, and he said he didn't, because they have a large mobile home (parked beside his house) with a big white dome on top. He said he frequents to the mountains a lot and found Direct TV would supply service to that type of antenna. Anyway we got into a real good conversation, and finally I asked what kind of reciever he used. He only remembered the "4" part of 4dtv before I finished the sentence! I couldn't believe it, but he said yeah i have that and the HD reciever with it. Dish has ku and cband and theres a good 100-150 feet of cable (in conduit even thru house!) Arm has a rubber boot and feedhorn has a cover. I then asked if he was willing to sell the reciever and he said sure, that he'd sell it.
Only condition was it had to be all together. I couldn't even guess a price. I was thinking in my head 300 or 350 for the 922 4dtv and 250 for HD200, so I was starting to sound doubtful I'd be able to spend that much all at once on something the wife hates. He said it's the newest stuff and is only a few years old and hardly used with 29 satellites programmed in. He only paid 1200 for it new, i think he said. (maybe theres some Norsats under the cover?) I was thrilled! Its going to be worth every penny to me! Now I have a near new 4dtv with HD (don't have a HD set yet :-( I was fixing to settle for a 920 from ebay or wait forever till skyvision got more new ones. He said he needed a couple weeks to get all the boxes and manuals out of the attic. Whoo hoo! The dish has a cool stand that mounts with four bolts into a concrete pad. Has one hole in mesh near the top, but otherwise in fine shape, especially with all the weather protective boots and covers! I'll take pictures and all sometime within the next couple weeks. I mentioned about FTA to him hoping he'd keep the dish, and he actually hesitated to think, but said he just likes Direct TV and wouldn't mind the extra room from the dish being gone. Now I have a 7.5 mesh and will have a 10 foot dish going to waste! I am tempted to use the 10 foot mesh, but I have a 8 foot 9 inch solid spun aluminum which I still feel confident would recieve the signal better. Dumb me when I first installed, didn't read up on the internet or anything, and just started touching things! Grrrrrr, I'm still kicking myself for that! Messed all that up, but I'm determined to fix it back! Unless yall think the mesh 10 footer is better?
 
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SAMI dish

somery I have that 10'Sami black mesh dish, it has been in place and in use since about 1995 or 96, friend moved from the country and gave it to me when it was still all shiny and new. And so far it gets super c-band analog and digital (those channels on G3 digital that everybody says break up-don't break up on this one). In fact when there was lots of Videocypher-scrambled channels around, I was hitting 100% on all of them. So I would recommend it, if it's in pretty good shape, and I think Sami repair panels are still available if you need them. They don't look like fancy dishes but mine sure does a good job.
Had ku-feedhorn on it for a short time, but the damn thing broke before I ever got ku sats lined up and I just set up another dish for ku only. But the mesh is small enough to do ku also.
 
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sounds like a great find :) i love looking and talking to folks about old dishes ;)
the 10 fter sounds great for c & ku . the solid sounds like it wouldn't be hard to get back into correct shape and direction so it will hit all the satellites in the arc ;)
 
YAY i got my dsr-922! whoohoo! stored sats were in wrong place and its missing most, but i added the main ones, tomorrow i might do a master reset.

My sig/quality numbers are 100/99 on G3, 100/79 on G1 03, and X4 didn't work yet. Even my analogs are all sparkle free with this reciever. I was fretting over nothing! I love the system, well worth it. I have the #590 dig essentials and #774 noggin nick suite, and #740 toon disney. Gotta change the ku lnb out with the ones i bought off that guy. he also had the precision hi stability cband lnb that i put on there (probably why my sig/quality is so high now ) and a norsat ku lnb, but i don't know the model as of right now. All together i spent about 3 hours figuring everything out, limits were cutting half the arc out, first ku lnb was bad, and i had to figure out how to add satellites and so forth.

Oh, and i was wrong about the dish, its a 10' Unimesh. Guess I misunderstood.
 
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glad to hear u got it working man. good luck. i bet ur happy u got a dsr-922!

YAY i got my dsr-922! whoohoo! stored sats were in wrong place and its missing most, but i added the main ones, tomorrow i might do a master reset.

My sig/quality numbers are 100/99 on G3, 100/79 on G1 03, and X4 didn't work yet. Even my analogs are all sparkle free with this reciever. I was fretting over nothing! I love the system, well worth it. I have the #590 dig essentials and #774 noggin nick suite, and #740 toon disney. Gotta change the ku lnb out with the ones i bought off that guy. he also had the precision hi stability cband lnb that i put on there (probably why my sig/quality is so high now ) and a norsat ku lnb, but i don't know the model as of right now. All together i spent about 3 hours figuring everything out, limits were cutting half the arc out, first ku lnb was bad, and i had to figure out how to add satellites and so forth.

Oh, and i was wrong about the dish, its a 10' Unimesh. Guess I misunderstood.
 
Chefwan,
i sure am excited! I should have just got the Absolute Digital package, which i'll probably get next month. I also have the analogs to keep up with, I still like TBS and such. I really really like the program guide, that takes the cake. Man I should have gotten one of these a long time ago! I'm kinda sad, you think NPS will let 4dtv go when IPTV comes along?

by the way I love ALTV because I missed a lot of Combat! episodes before

88 signal, 94 quality on X4 ku now. don't know how quality is more than signal, but it is.

edit to add: wanted to add, that i thought the sd pictures like discovery and such, are so, WOW with brilliance. i have a HD200 decoder, but no HDTV :-( now i need to go get a big tv :-/ (ok not anytime soon, maybe i should sell the HD200? i mean i want it, but someone else might be able to use it, are they hard to get?)

also WAF went up big time! I didn't have to ask, but she volunteered that the picture was nice (we're used to Direct TV from when we go visit father-in-law) and shes one of those that can tolerate a OTA signal with broken rabbit ears (thanks kids) and she actually got excited on some shows she now gets to see. We never had cable or little dish here because wife wouldn't pay that much for tv, so before now it was Fox News and Bill O' Reilly or nothing. (sometimes movies on TBS and TNT -- hated the showtime and thought i subbed behind her back :p ) (and ABC on cband, cause i can't stand our ugly OTA reception and i didn't have an AB switch or whatnot) So now shes a user of the system again. When I had the Drake 1624 U ESR she used that ok, cute watching her change sats. Then the tuner burned out (when you turned it on it'd show 255 signal and within seconds it would count down to 9) and i had to use the backup Chaparral Monterrey, which she refused to use, too hard for her to use. I had to do something!

ok, well now I'm going to Halloween Festival at daughters school, see ya'll later!
 
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actually thats where it ended up after I changed the ku lnb. I haven't retuned since I had the analog reciever hooked up, and it was pretty sparklie on G1 and some on G5 (and Melissa Scott was spaklie too) After I switched, it all seemed pretty tuned. I might try to tweak it more at a later date, using the built in sig/qual meter, but its great as it for now. X4 isn't as clean as the discovery feeds i noticed. But I don't see any fluctuations in any readings, nor have I needed any rehits so far. All is awesome!
I was going to turn on TI filter to see if it'd help (before I saw that readings were fine), but its working fine without it, so I won't mess with it.
 
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