Stab vs Digipower Motors: Which to use?

[cyberham]

In the mail coming to me are a couple of motors. I have a shipment with one Stab HH120 and one Digipower SG2100 en route to me. The Stab is new in the box; the Digipower is used but in good condition. Which motor would you install if given this choice? I'm going to use one of these initially for my second motorized Ku system.

I know the Stab moves slowly. This is likely its greatest disadvantage. But its mounting stub points upward which is an advantage if you want to change the dish. It's easier to drop a dish by yourself downward onto an upward-pointing stub than to pull a dish up onto a downward pointing stub as the Digipower has.

An advantage of the Digipower is that I've use one for over 10 years so I'm familiar with its idiosyncracies. It also has a reset button to use when things don't seem to be working correctly. The Stab doesn't as far as I know.

I already know which one I'm going to use at least initially. But I wonder what others would do?

 

[Titanium]

The HH120 has a 55mm post suitable for larger dish bracket mounts. The SG2100 was available in two sizes, 42mm and 55mm. In my experience the HH120 has provided better reliability, less slop in the backlash (manual adjustment) and has a much heavier gauge bracket. The Stab motors require a DiSEqC reset provided by the STAB install tool, early model DVBS receivers (i.e. Fortec) or via a DVBS/S2 tuner card / USB and TSReader to generate the DiSEqC command: E0 30 6B 00 to clear the memory.

 

[cyberham]

For all of the above, I absolutely plan to install the Stab HH120. The SG2100 is a good motor but it has always been a little overwhelmed by even a heavy 1m dish let alone a 1.2m dish. Though it did turn my 1.2m when I used it for that. My current SG2100 has the 42mm mast stub.

I'm not worried about my inability to issue a reset command. If I need it, I'll cross that bridge then.

Besides, you don't learn anything if you don't try new things. The Stab should arrive late next week if the postal system keeps their promise.

 

[cyberham]

I now have the new Stab HH120 installed. It's a nice motor that can handle my heavy 41" dish compared against my SG2100 that's been in service for 14 years. The heavy duty Stab seems like it could handle even a 1.2m dish. Specs for the Stab are to handle up to 37 lbs of dish.

Using just USALS without any correction, I located 72.7W Nimiq 5 on the first try as my furthest east satellite. This is almost a 60 degree azimuth swing to the east from due south and is about the maximum this motor can do. Its specs are 65 degrees plus/minus from centre.

72.7W has a full-time strong transponder as listed in Lyngsat at 12214 R 3398 from the Ontario Legislative channel. It's actually playing good music now with a changing slate of government activities. I am receiving this tp using a linear LNB even though it's a circular tp. It's the only channel receivable from this satellite since the other tps are Turbo 8PSK from Dish.

I also learned that I can receive many tps from 78.8W Sky Mexico and lock one of them even though the satellite's footprint is supposedly only about 33 dBW at this location according to satstar.net. Though there's nothing ITC right now that I can lock.

I also now have access to 82W, 81W, 77W, 73.8W from this tripod support location. Again, not too much coming from these satellites although 77W has four interesting long-time Mexican channels again receivable using a linear LNB though they are circular tp channels.

 

[mr_rye89]

My SG2100 has never worked consistently with either of my receivers. Like it has a mind of its own lol. If I had a STAB HH motor I'd probably take another stab at setting up a ku HH dish

 

[cyberham]

My SG2100 has never worked consistently with either of my receivers. Like it has a mind of its own lol. If I had a STAB HH motor I'd probably take another stab at setting up a ku HH dish

I now have two motorized Ku dishes. It's nice to catch a little farther on the eastern arc side.

Regarding the MOIO syndrome, have you tried resetting the Digipower and also ensured the cable isn't too long resulting in low voltage at the motor? On my Stab, USALS works better than moving via diseqc commands. And, of course, ensure the dish itself is not too heavy. Those are likely the biggest problems to cause erratic operation. It doesn't hurt either to always be tuned to a horizontal transponder when moving the dish to keep voltage supplied to the motor at the highest level.

 

[cyberham]

Today I noticed my new Stab HH120 could, in theory, rotate around to see 180E Ku. I don't need it to do this since I already have a fixed dish on that satellite. But I just had to try.

In the first photo, you can see when it's rotated to the correct azimuth, the LNB arm of the 41" dish is just shy of hitting an adjacent tree. You can see in the background in this photo the fixed 1.2m inverted dish precisely aimed at 180E and working fine to receive Tahiti Nui TV, France 24 plus radio channels.



180E is 63 degrees west of my due south azimuth. The Stab can handle that using USALS which is so accurate that I can move from 150W to 72.7W using USALS and catch all satellites on the arc. I stopped using diseqc commands since the USALS is more accurate.


The photo below shows the adjacent tree "shadowing" the dish just a little!


Bottom line is I checked for 180E, 177W, 159.4W, 150W. Nothing found except for 69 data tps on 150W. I think the trees in front of the dish are what blocked the signal from 180E. Oh well...back to using the fixed dish.