Friday I received my STAB HH120 motor, onto which I mounted my old Primestar dish using the 3" adaptor rings designed to adapt Channel Master dish mounts to the STAB motor. My understanding is that the 40x30 Primestar dishes are rebranded Channel Masters anyway, so I figured why not give it a shot? I thought about doing things this way a couple years ago when I was first getting into FTA, but the adaptor rings were nowhere to be found.
So, the first problem I ran into is how to properly align the dish on the motor itself. Conventional setups have a a marking on the dish mount that aligns with the small line on the motor, thus assuring that your dish points directly south when the motor is mounted to a pole correctly and the motor is in the zero position. With the adaptor rings and the Primestar dish's mount, though, there's no such reference. So I eyeballed it, did the rest of the alignment, and lo and behold, it works! I seem to be tracking the arc pretty well, even out at the west end (the extreme east is blocked by a tree). Some of the transponders on Galaxy 25 were a little marginal, though, so I figure "no problem, I'll tweak it tomorrow!"
Big mistake.
I end up spending a huge chunk of Sunday dicking around with this setup, and I can't even get things aligned as well as I had them on Saturday. I have two variables I can't account for - the position of the dish on the motor itself (as I described above), and the proper elevation. I found a tool on Sadoun's site that supposedly tells you what to set your dish elevation to when it's mounted on a STAB motor, but it's completely wrong. I've found references here to people simply using their angle finders in the center of the dish and calculating the actual look angle of the dish as 90 - (whatever the angle finder reads). That doesn't seem to work either. If I knew I had the elevation correct I could probably dial it in, but with the dish/motor relationship questionable and the dish elevation, there are just too many variables involved.
So, any suggestions? I'm considering a couple of possibilities. One is simply to get a Fortec Star 120cm dish, but that's like $130 + shipping, and I'd hate to spend that kind of money when I have a perfectly fine dish right here. Another is to somehow take my receiver outside with me and just keep playing with things until I see that I find that I'm not only on the arc, but on the correct satellite (I have only a cheap "satellite finder" meter, which tells me when I'm on the arc, but not which satellite I'm aimed at).
For what it's worth, I'm reasonably good at aiming dishes by hand, using little more than the satellite meter and a compass. When I had this dish on a fixed pole, I could often aim the dish this way and be dead on the satellite I wanted on the first try. So it's not like I'm completely clueless when it comes to working with dishes. But this is my first motorized setup, and the non-standard dish is complicating things.
Last question: Does the motor itself remember anything about dish positions, using either DiSEqC 1.2 or USALS? The only success I had on Sunday was by using USALS to get to the wrong position, then "bumping" the dish to the east while tuned to a strong transponder using DiSEqC 1.2 mode. I hope I didn't make things worse by confusing the motor, too. If so, I have no idea how to reset it. The manual that comes with the STAB is written in rather broken English.
Thanks in advance for any advice. I realize this is a bit long, but I knew the people on this forum could at least sympathize, and probably help, too! Heh...
So, the first problem I ran into is how to properly align the dish on the motor itself. Conventional setups have a a marking on the dish mount that aligns with the small line on the motor, thus assuring that your dish points directly south when the motor is mounted to a pole correctly and the motor is in the zero position. With the adaptor rings and the Primestar dish's mount, though, there's no such reference. So I eyeballed it, did the rest of the alignment, and lo and behold, it works! I seem to be tracking the arc pretty well, even out at the west end (the extreme east is blocked by a tree). Some of the transponders on Galaxy 25 were a little marginal, though, so I figure "no problem, I'll tweak it tomorrow!"
Big mistake.
I end up spending a huge chunk of Sunday dicking around with this setup, and I can't even get things aligned as well as I had them on Saturday. I have two variables I can't account for - the position of the dish on the motor itself (as I described above), and the proper elevation. I found a tool on Sadoun's site that supposedly tells you what to set your dish elevation to when it's mounted on a STAB motor, but it's completely wrong. I've found references here to people simply using their angle finders in the center of the dish and calculating the actual look angle of the dish as 90 - (whatever the angle finder reads). That doesn't seem to work either. If I knew I had the elevation correct I could probably dial it in, but with the dish/motor relationship questionable and the dish elevation, there are just too many variables involved.
So, any suggestions? I'm considering a couple of possibilities. One is simply to get a Fortec Star 120cm dish, but that's like $130 + shipping, and I'd hate to spend that kind of money when I have a perfectly fine dish right here. Another is to somehow take my receiver outside with me and just keep playing with things until I see that I find that I'm not only on the arc, but on the correct satellite (I have only a cheap "satellite finder" meter, which tells me when I'm on the arc, but not which satellite I'm aimed at).
For what it's worth, I'm reasonably good at aiming dishes by hand, using little more than the satellite meter and a compass. When I had this dish on a fixed pole, I could often aim the dish this way and be dead on the satellite I wanted on the first try. So it's not like I'm completely clueless when it comes to working with dishes. But this is my first motorized setup, and the non-standard dish is complicating things.
Last question: Does the motor itself remember anything about dish positions, using either DiSEqC 1.2 or USALS? The only success I had on Sunday was by using USALS to get to the wrong position, then "bumping" the dish to the east while tuned to a strong transponder using DiSEqC 1.2 mode. I hope I didn't make things worse by confusing the motor, too. If so, I have no idea how to reset it. The manual that comes with the STAB is written in rather broken English.
Thanks in advance for any advice. I realize this is a bit long, but I knew the people on this forum could at least sympathize, and probably help, too! Heh...
