How to Motorize Your Satellite Dish
Friday, July 17th, 2009Satellites for many of us is the source to watch TV. There are subscriptions for for different types of packages all around the world, you maybe have one as well and are getting the signals through your satellite dish. Most likely you have a small dish because that's often all that's required to watch the channels from your country because the beam is strongest near its targeted country. The interesting thing is that if you tried turning the dish you possibly be able to get channels from other satellite, like from a different country. The sky is full of satellites and Free to Air that does not require a big dish. The main satellites in Europe are Hotbird 13E and Astra 19E which carries lots of FTA channels in different languages, like Spanish, Italian and Russian. It may not sound interesting to tune in to the foreign channels. But now lets say you would like to watch a sports event that is not broadcasted on your viewing package but the match is on a FTA channel on another satellite, wouldn't it be great to watch it? Really there is plenty to watch. Still after some time its not that much fun having to go outside and manually turn the satellite dish every time between satellitesto catch the signals. This is where motors come into the picture. There are different motors, such as Diceqc, 36v H to H and polar mounts. Diseqc are the most installed and they work fine for dishes up to 1 meter dishes. With this type of motor it uses your satellite receiver as power that runs on 17v/12v. Receivers have limited power available for the motor as it has to share it with the LNB, this means they are slow and not so strong as H to H motors. 36v H to H motors are stronger built, can handle higher wind loads and drive larger dishes as they use their own source of power from the receivers built-in 36v positioner. Most digital receivers don't have this positioner but in this case you could use a device like the V-Box. The advantage of this is the positions are stored inside the V-Box rather than into the receivers software. So all the different motors do the same thing, tracks the satellite arc within 180 degrees. Its not possible to go beyond as all the other satellites are under the horizon, like from your location invisible. Its a good move to plan where to put the dish so fences and other objects are not in the way so you have view to the satellites you want to receive. When everything is setup and aligned correctly the dish will rotate to the satellites location as you switch the channel. This will open up to a whole new world of TV as you can view channels from many countries around the world. Only limit is now the dish size. On Lyngsat you can find out what size dish you need in your location for any targeted satellite. The larger dish you have, the more channels you can receive.
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