Question about SL5 install and pointing.

[Spydertech]

Been lurking and reading for quite a while. I am finally replacing my tired HD Tivo with a HR22. And, of course, I ran into some problems....

A little background. My house is built with the front facing approximately 185 degrees. The cables come into the house on the west side. I have a Phase III dish located on the west wall, about 6 feet from the ground. The Phase III has no issue getting the sats it it supposed (since it is aimed at 199 degrees). The way the house is built, I think I can mount the SL5 dish near that location and be OK (dishpointer.com says I have to point it 182.8 degrees magnetic). What I'm wondering is, how much to either side of the dish needs to be clear? Is LOS really LOS to the center of the reflector?

I mounted the Dish on a corner that faced south along the west wall (about 3 feet from the west wall itself) - see attached image. That was the only place I could mount the dish with the mast it came with. I can't mount it along the west side of the corner because the mast is too short and won't allow me to adjust the azimuth. I do have LOS in to 182 degrees, from what I can tell.

I was unable to get any sat reading (I was looking for 101 on transponder 19 using a receiver). It started to get dark, so I removed the dish. And reconnected the Phase III. I also noticed that when I made the intial elevation, I had set it too high (the painted red mark is awfully wide, and I think I used the wrong side). If I'm reading it correctly I had the elevation at 53 degrees, if I'm reading it wrong, I had the elevation at more like 54 degrees. Before I go through the fun again, I wanted to get some of your thoughts.

I know I should consider a roof mount, but I'm sure not going to do it. The roof is too high and too large of a pitch for me to be comfortable. That, and it is very common where I live to have the roof replaced every few years because of hail damage.

Spydertech

[doctor j]

Phase III points at 110 sat. Slimline at 101.

Therefore line of site is 9 degrees east.

Usually if phase III can see, slimline is ok. 119, 9 degees west and lower is the problem, most of the time.
You may be cutting it close.
The 101 is a few degrees higher on the elevation than the 110, but in TX is usually close to due south.

Mounting it as close to the "front" south of the house would be best.

In your thumbnail if pointing south, the green arrow is on the west wall. ??? (In dishpointer, you can move the arrow. If indeed your dish is on east wall you need to move the arrow so as not to be confusing!?)
Is driveway on Front (South) side of house??

101 should come in easy, fine tuning for the 99/103 is the hard part.

Good Luck

Doctor j

[Spydertech]

Thank you doctor j!
Your are correct, the dish is on the west wall, not east. Don't know what I was thinking.


I got home last night and decided to mess with it some more. I lowered the elevation to 51 degrees, re-mounted the mast (and checked the plumb), put the dish and lnb on the mast. I pointed in the direction I thought was correct, nothing. Went and got my compass and checked it. I was off a little. Moved to the west a couple of degrees. When I walked into the garage to check the receiver, I had 100 on the 101 sat on transponder 19. Checked some other transponders and all were high. Checked the 119. Same thing 92 to 100 on the transponders. The 110 is a little lower 75 to 90.
So, I plug in the BBC mudules the HR22, go to the satellite setup and check the 99 and 103. This is where it gets interesting. The 99 is 88 and up accross the board. the 99(s) has 0 on several transponders, and the rest are pretty low (with a couple being in the 90s). The 103 is a little stranger. The first line of tranponders is all 0s. Then I get a range from 33 to 98. Now, I haven't done any dial-in adjustments on the dish, this is just setting the dish up on the bench then mounting it and manually adjusting the azimuth. Am I supposed to see more transponders on the 99(s) and 103, or are some them going to be 0? Where should I start the dial-in process?

Here are the readings from the 99(s) (of the transponders not listed as N/A)
37 0 54 0 51
0
37 0 59 0 59 0
0 0
94 91 0

The 103
0 0 0 0 0 0
97 99
62 33 76 53 98 98 93

Thanks again!
Spydertech

[veryoldschool]

Here are the readings from the 99(s) (of the transponders not listed as N/A)
37 0 54 0 51
0
37 0 59 0 59 0
0 0
94 91 0

The 103
0 0 0 0 0 0
97 99
62 33 76 53 98 98 93

Thanks again!
Spydertech The "s" SATs are spot beams, so very few will have any reading. The "c" SATs are the ones to focus on and then the "s" will be fine.

[Spydertech]

The "s" SATs are spot beams, so very few will have any reading. The "c" SATs are the ones to focus on and then the "s" will be fine.

Thank you!

After doing some more searching and reading, I just figured that out. I didn't record all the transponder readings for all the sats last night (it was getting kind of late). I will be checking them tonight. From what I recall, all the others looked fine. After my 4 hour debacle on Saturday, I was extremely happy last night when it took all of 10 minutes to get the dish pointed as well as it is so far. I went and told my wife I was able to ge the new dish pointed and mounted where I wanted it. I told her that she will finally get her shows in HD. It just amazes me how my wife does not share my enthusiam when it comes to these things. She just stared at me like I was speaking in tongues or something... :rolleyes:

I really appreciate the help.

Once I have this dialed in, I need to re-run the cabling and clean it up.

[BattleZone]

There's another issue, though. The Slimline dish is too wide to be turned parallel with the wall it is mounted to. The edges of the dish will contact the wall at around 55 degrees of rotation, and you'd need nearly 90 degrees.

The Phase III dish, which its extended mast, will allow almost 80 degrees of rotation before the edge of the dish hits the wall, plus due to being centered on 110, doesn't need as much rotation as the Slimline will.

For those reasons, I'm pretty sure you're going to need a new location for the dish.

[Spydertech]

There's another issue, though. The Slimline dish is too wide to be turned parallel with the wall it is mounted to. The edges of the dish will contact the wall at around 55 degrees of rotation, and you'd need nearly 90 degrees.

The Phase III dish, which its extended mast, will allow almost 80 degrees of rotation before the edge of the dish hits the wall, plus due to being centered on 110, doesn't need as much rotation as the Slimline will.

For those reasons, I'm pretty sure you're going to need a new location for the dish.

That was the first problem I ran into. I couldn't mount it where the old phase 3 was. I do have a section of the wall that faces almost directly south on the west side of the house. That section is only about 3 feet wide though, then it meets the west wall of my garage. I did mount the dish on this section Saturday, but I had the initial settings wrong and was unable to pick up any of the satellites. That led to total frustration. Which then led to a ton of online research to find out if I could use that location or not. LOS was my big concern. Did the dish need to have a lot of clearance to the side, or a very narrow view of the five satellites that it needs? After some reading I realized that the dish needs to see 5 very small points that are very far away. As long as the garage wall or the eave doesn't block it from seeing those five spots in the sky it should be fine.

So, last night, I remounted the mast on the south facing portion of the west wall, about 8 feet from the ground. Reset all the initial settings (now that I understood them better). Placed the dish on the mast, tightened the nuts (leaving it loose enough that I can turn the dish). I was able to get the 101 in the 95-100 range with ease. the 119 and 110 are set well also (I don't remember the exact readings, but they are quite a bit higher than my phase 3 was getting).

When I connected the HR22 I was a little nervous. After the answers I received this morning, and a lot more searching and reading, I feel pretty good about it. I will check my readings later tonight. Once I figure out what dial-in procedures I need to do, I will be working on that this weekend.

After my two first failed attempts, I was a little frustrated. Before I started reading, I could only think of three options.
1-Roof mount (did not want to do that at all)
2-Mount it on the front of the house (wife would probably kill me)
3-Find some way to extend the mounting section to give the reflector more clearance from the wall, and possibly move to the east wall (just more money to spend, plus an extremely long run of cables accross the back of the house, possibly making the run longer than the 125 foot limit)

With some new information and doctor j's post I found the courage to try the south facing portion of the west wall last night - with success! So far. The LNB sees all the satellites, but I have not done any final settings yet. Who knows, I may still have trouble with the 99 sat. I did check the sats and transponders using the HR22 last night, and the only readings that concerned me (at the time) were the 103s and 99s. Of course it was almost 1 am, I was little dumber, and I didn't write down all the readings, so I may still have issues. I'll know more tonight.

Although this project is not finished, I do want to thank everyone for your help!

Spydertech

[Spydertech]

Update.
I was able to run a check on the HR22 last night at about 10:30. Everything checked out great! the 99 and 103c signals are all above 87, with most in the 90s. Now to finish the install and clean up the cabling..

Thanks again for all your help!!!!!

Now if I can just figure out how to turn of the blue ring.

Spydertech

[veryoldschool]

Update.
I was able to run a check on the HR22 last night at about 10:30. Everything checked out great! the 99 and 103c signals are all above 87, with most in the 90s. Now to finish the install and clean up the cabling..

Thanks again for all your help!!!!!

Now if I can just figure out how to turn of the blue ring.

Spydertech
front panel press <> at the same time [3 dimmer, 4th off]

[Spydertech]

Thanks.

[HoTat2]

Thanks.

Humph... :sure:

Here I am helping others around here and decide to check my own signal levels for a SL-5 install I had done about 1 1/2 years for an HD upgrade which both a "very trusted" (in the words of a field supervisor at the time) first level technician did who was then joined a little later on the job by that same supervisor.

Well ... the 101, 110, 119, Ku band levels appear to be OK with levels all in the 80s-90s, but the Ka CONUS levels however are unfortunately somewhat low I guess...

99(c):

58 70 65 70 60 69 64 69
61 69 64 66 66 72 N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

103(c) is a little better at:

77 82 70 73 75 80 69 74
76 81 73 76 77 82 N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

My Ka band spotbeam levels are hot at 100 each for the two HD LiL transponders 19 and 21 at 103(s) assigned to the Los Angeles DMA. But interestingly there is only one other reading at "0" on 103(s) with all others listed as "N/A." And 99(s) has only Transponder 22 with a level reading of "74" again with all others listed as "N/A."

Guess I really should have expected as much and had them check all the levels before I signed off on it since now it's a $49 service call being way out of the paltry 90 day warranty at this point.

When I watched the first level tech install the dish he used his signal meter of course (don't know the model though definitely not a Super Buddy) and I was surprised how rapid it went, but I never saw him use an ASL for the coarse adjustments or perform a dithering procedure for the Ka band vernier adjustment.

So sigh... :mad: time to get out the ladder and call up a friend for the two man cell phone procedure for tweaking the dish I guess... Though I admit to never having a signal problem on the Ka band HD channels, and a DirecTV first level CSR says as long as you have signal with no error messages, then it's best to just leave it alone. But I'm not comfortable with this situation, especially for the levels on 99(c).

BTW, the dish was not grounded nor was any sealant placed around the lag bolts for the roof mount (The mast footing and two monopoles for bracing).

Thanks "Connect TV" (my HSP). :rolleyes: