I have been given a 90cm dish to use for 28.2e is this too big ?
If you're in the UK you don't need a dish anywhere near this size.
If you really wanted to use it then it should work fine though, I've used far larger than this dish size with a motorised system when it has been pointing at 28.2 degrees.
I don't think a dish can be too big in a technical sense, although of course massive dishes might be an eyesore. Larger dishes can theoretically withstand poor weather conditions better too.
I seem to remember in the old analogue days that when I was using my 100cm dish and viewing channels on 19.2e too much signal was coming in causing I think the term was sparklies that's why I asked ?
Yes I remember that too with my 1.8 metre dish in the analogue days, it seemed strange that "sparklies" could be caused by too little signal, or by too much signal.
Different effects actually, but the result on-screen looked pretty much the same!
Overloading of the front end of the receiver is still possible even with digital signals of course, but I've not seen any problems even using the big dish on recent very powerful satellites.
Off topic, but does anyone know why the details of the "services" in your profile no longer seem to appear underneath your name on the forum?
They used to appear under "location".
Years ago it was very easy to upset an analogue tuner. Amstrad were notorious for it. They started with SRX series receivers that had fixed frequencies so if there was drift you were stuck. Then their bluecap LNB's went anything up to 3dB noise figures.
As the LNB's had their noise figures tightened the tuners didn't keep up and some of the receivers had bad problems. I did motorised installs at the time and had people phoning me up to ask for dish realignment but it was often tuner overload even on a 60cm dish once Astra 1C was launched with higher power. Then combine that with Astra 1D and there were problems all over the place for people running poor quality coax as signals bled through to their UHF TV tuners.
It's funny now looking back, but at the time the Global 1D devices pushed the boundary of technical equipment at the time and for me as a motorised user at the time at one stage I had three different LNB's on my dish with offset motorised positions to get either FSS, BSS or Telecom bands. Now we do everything on one universal LNB that costs less than a meal at a good restaurant.
Back then though, I'm reminiscing for a moment, to operate equipment and troubleshoot it properly you needed to understand theory and it was practically quite expensive too. Today, like many technical things, much is plug-and-play and a doddle compared to how it used to be. Modern tuners don't care too much about overload since as long as a data signal can be interpreted the receiver can error correct. It can be easy today to be close to a signal threshold and not even notice, years ago the signal could drop off and be very noticeable but then other things like Threshold Extension were clever features to pull in weak satellites (I remember getting Thor at 5 west on an 80cm dish when I should have used 1.2 for where I lived).
The Threshold Extension system on my Chaparral Monterey receiver was absolutely brilliant, made a recognisable (although not great quality) picture out of apparently almost nothing sometimes!
Happy days.
The Threshold Extension system on my Chaparral Monterey receiver was absolutely brilliant, made a recognisable (although not great quality) picture out of apparently almost nothing sometimes!
Happy days.
I longed for a Monterey, I remember buying What Satellite for years and it always featured on the back cover (as an aside I googled wotsat and blooming heck they disappeared the other month!). The Monterey pretty much did everything, I seem to remember they had a digital add-on board too. They never did make it into the digital market though, it was wall-to-wall Nokia with their MediaMaster I remember in the early days of digital.
I had a Strong receiver with an array of attachments hidden away behind it. I could set relays to turn each attachment on or off as I needed it so from the front end it seemed automatic. I had an RTL4 decoder (which later did RTL5, SBS6 and Veronica), a Secam transcoder, a D-Mac decoder which was a converted Philips BSB receiver, it was brilliant.
I also had a Squarial at one point and opened it up to flip the plates over inside to change from circular to linear polarity so I could pick up the Telecom satellites at 5 west. Very happy days back then, things could and did go wrong but it was all a game. I always remember a satellite festival being on the then brand new PanAmSat at 45 degrees west and before then the furthest west satellite was Intelsat 501 at 27.5w I used, I never had 45 west. So I ended up putting a 1 metre dish on a patio table at the bottom of the garden to clear the shadow of the house and a scaffold board on the other side of the table to balance it, with a scaffold pole through the centre to hold the dish.
Bet hardly anyone these days would bother doing stuff like that, me and friends had a great laugh at the time though and a new satellite was always exciting. As a footnote I remember staying up to watch Ariane 5 and saw it blow up live. Ever since then every live broadcast has been blank from a few seconds after launch to a couple of minutes in, then they'll replay the launch if it has gone well.
Comments
If you're in the UK you don't need a dish anywhere near this size.
If you really wanted to use it then it should work fine though, I've used far larger than this dish size with a motorised system when it has been pointing at 28.2 degrees.
Different effects actually, but the result on-screen looked pretty much the same!
Overloading of the front end of the receiver is still possible even with digital signals of course, but I've not seen any problems even using the big dish on recent very powerful satellites.
Off topic, but does anyone know why the details of the "services" in your profile no longer seem to appear underneath your name on the forum?
They used to appear under "location".
As the LNB's had their noise figures tightened the tuners didn't keep up and some of the receivers had bad problems. I did motorised installs at the time and had people phoning me up to ask for dish realignment but it was often tuner overload even on a 60cm dish once Astra 1C was launched with higher power. Then combine that with Astra 1D and there were problems all over the place for people running poor quality coax as signals bled through to their UHF TV tuners.
It's funny now looking back, but at the time the Global 1D devices pushed the boundary of technical equipment at the time and for me as a motorised user at the time at one stage I had three different LNB's on my dish with offset motorised positions to get either FSS, BSS or Telecom bands. Now we do everything on one universal LNB that costs less than a meal at a good restaurant.
Back then though, I'm reminiscing for a moment, to operate equipment and troubleshoot it properly you needed to understand theory and it was practically quite expensive too. Today, like many technical things, much is plug-and-play and a doddle compared to how it used to be. Modern tuners don't care too much about overload since as long as a data signal can be interpreted the receiver can error correct. It can be easy today to be close to a signal threshold and not even notice, years ago the signal could drop off and be very noticeable but then other things like Threshold Extension were clever features to pull in weak satellites (I remember getting Thor at 5 west on an 80cm dish when I should have used 1.2 for where I lived).
Happy days.
I longed for a Monterey, I remember buying What Satellite for years and it always featured on the back cover (as an aside I googled wotsat and blooming heck they disappeared the other month!). The Monterey pretty much did everything, I seem to remember they had a digital add-on board too. They never did make it into the digital market though, it was wall-to-wall Nokia with their MediaMaster I remember in the early days of digital.
I had a Strong receiver with an array of attachments hidden away behind it. I could set relays to turn each attachment on or off as I needed it so from the front end it seemed automatic. I had an RTL4 decoder (which later did RTL5, SBS6 and Veronica), a Secam transcoder, a D-Mac decoder which was a converted Philips BSB receiver, it was brilliant.
I also had a Squarial at one point and opened it up to flip the plates over inside to change from circular to linear polarity so I could pick up the Telecom satellites at 5 west. Very happy days back then, things could and did go wrong but it was all a game. I always remember a satellite festival being on the then brand new PanAmSat at 45 degrees west and before then the furthest west satellite was Intelsat 501 at 27.5w I used, I never had 45 west. So I ended up putting a 1 metre dish on a patio table at the bottom of the garden to clear the shadow of the house and a scaffold board on the other side of the table to balance it, with a scaffold pole through the centre to hold the dish.
Bet hardly anyone these days would bother doing stuff like that, me and friends had a great laugh at the time though and a new satellite was always exciting. As a footnote I remember staying up to watch Ariane 5 and saw it blow up live. Ever since then every live broadcast has been blank from a few seconds after launch to a couple of minutes in, then they'll replay the launch if it has gone well.