Strangest thing you bolted a FTA dish to?

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Mr Tony

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Nov 17, 2003
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Mankato, MN
This got me thinking today when I was working on the big dish. As most of you know one of my 6 foot dishes is bolted to a table. Also the 2 Primestar dishes are bolted to another table. This is to clear the roof for line of site

so I guess the question is what is the strangest thing that you've bolted your dish to?
 
some that I can think of doing besides the table

-the trailer hitch on my truck. Did that originally to do the Glorystar review
-at our cabin I use to take a 18" dish with for free radio on ExpressVu (before they scrambled it) and I would bolt the dish to a 4x4 timber that was about a foot long and use that to keep the dish bolted
 

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How about a Direct TV prepaid system 18" dish attached to a little tree. :D
 

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That works :) on the camper what I do when I take to the Hills (cab over mounted on trailer, local forest and hunting use only) the front jacks have holes that let me bolt a 2x6 by about 3' to, which I bolt the mount to with lag bolts... I have went tent camping with a 18" mounted to a 2"x12" x 4' before and put rocks on it to hold it down... but... not on topic ;)
 
cheap C-clamps from Harbor Freight

In my back yard, I've C-clamped to a little table that I specifically took out there for the task.
It wasn't really an outdoor table...
I have some pretty big C-clamps for such jobs. ;)

Of course, I have a 5 gallon bucket of cement with a 5' post for experiments,
...doesn't everyone?
...but that's not unusual.

Oh, in the same vein... I took the other half of my previously 10' post to a friend's house.
He had an outdoor umbrella stand (like for a picnic table) which was a big casting a couple of feet across.
The pole fit right into it, and we installed a dish on it.

I did once C-clamp a foot to the top of a wooden 6' ladder in a buddy's back yard, for show 'n tell.
Not that stable, but what 'cha gonna do??
He's just about to give in and go FTA, so it was worth it. - :up
 
I don't have a picture, but my 1st dedicated ku dish was mounted to one of my clothesline post. If I positioned it high, I could get from 72.0w to129.0w, but it would hit the crossbar to prevent me from going further east. I could lower it and get to Hispasat at 30.0w, but then a tree would knock out everything west of 101.0w. So, I opted for the higher position. I now have that dish on it's own pole in a better location, with no LOS issues. It's an 80cm dish and I rarely use it anymore.
 
In the past to point my StarChoice receiver at X4 to get AMC (when it was in the clear, not encrypted) I had a 24" dish mounted on a concrete block for I could move it around. Also when I had my 1m down, I proped it up against a lawn chair to use for one evening. I would not call these unusual, just interesting. Also, as in my avatar, 2 dishes mounted on my TV tower. (since removed for easier access)
 
I have a motorized 76cm on the roof of the building where my office is located mounted on some pressure treated 4x4 posts bolted together and decking boards on top with cinder blocks holding it down.

Sort of a poor man's NPRM.


Works. I guess I will have to apply some thompson's waterseal every now and then LOL
 
Childrens' slide.

After the second time my tripod blew over in very high local winds (this was with cinderblocks weighing each leg down!), I decided to come up with a more solid mounting option.

So I recently mounted my 90 cm Geosat Pro dish to a children's metal slide in the back yard. (I'm renting so I didn't want to pour concrete. Everyone here is too grown up to play on slides, so I got the go-ahead to use it.).

It happens the front vertical bars face south, so I U-bolted the SG2100 (motek / Sadoun) motor to one of the vertical bars and mounted the dish to the motor. (I had to slightly enlarge the dish hole to fit the motor for some reason for the bolt to pass through. Not sure why it didn't quite line up, but in any rate...)

The results are great. Luckily, the guy who installed the slide (which was probably in the 1960's ;P did a decent job of making it plumb.

As a result, I can scan from 129 to 72 with uniformly strong signals and I was able to change all the "tweaked" DiseqC 1.2 motor settings to plain old USALS.

I'm happy to have dispensed with the tripod mount. :)

The only drawback is the dish motor is considerably louder. Presumably the large metal object acts to transmit the vibrations from a larger surface area, making the motor noise couple to the air more efficiently (impedance match). Or maybe that's now why, but it is louder. :p
 
i saw a little pizza dish bolted to a big dish once. I seen dishes bolted to trees. A few Days ago I saw a directv dish bolted to the front bumper of someones van. no pics
 
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