Two twin lnbf's, one Dish500 dish?

[Jacob S]

Is there a way I can put two twin lnbf's on one Dish500 dish and get a successful signal on both?

[xgrep]

Is there a way I can put two twin lnbf's on one Dish500 dish and get a successful signal on both?No. Or at least not if you're trying to receive the same two satellites (i.e., you might end up aimed at something else that has a signal). But what are you trying to do? Maybe there's another way to get what you want.

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[HTguy]

There certainly is no way of putting 2 TWINs on a D500.

Are you sure you don't mean 2 DUALs? That can always be done with SW21(s) or an SW44.

[Jacob S]

Nah, I was just curious if anyone has ever tried it.

[Dealers nemesis]

OMG and you are supposedly a dealer! ROFLMFAO

[Jacob S]

What does that have to do with me being a dealer? I am so sick of you and your degrading posts towards me. I had seen where some have put multiple lnbf's on one dish before but the dishes were larger. The do have larger Dish500's for those in Alaska and Hawaii or to bring a stronger signals to prevent rain fade if I recall correctly.

[xgrep]

What does that have to do with me being a dealer?I think his point is that a dealer, if he/she provides installation service, should have enough technical competence to know that that can't work with K-band satellite equipment.

If you think about it, it's not hard to understand. You can think of the parabolic reflector as a sort of magnifying glass. If you ever used a magnifying glass to concentrate sunlight into a tiny spot to burn things, it's exactly the same principle. The "rays" of RF coming from the satellite get focused onto a couple of small spots. The more perfect the shape of the dish, the smaller the spot. These dishes aren't too perfect, and the size of the spot is probably around a cm or two in diameter. You have to orient the dish so that the reflected/focused spot lands right on the center of the LNBF head. I actually considered modifying a camcorder to be able to show the spot in the viewfinder. The frequency is getting near IR, but not close enough for my idea to have worked, but if it had, it would be the darned coolest way to aim a dish.

But I digress. Each satellite's "rays" come from the direction of the satellite's position in orbit, and so reflect/focus off the dish onto a different spot. So you can see that for a given orientation of the dish, there's only a single spot on which a given satellite's "rays" are going to focus. You can't get any other LNBFs into the same spot to pick up a particular satellite.

What you may have seen in your experience is large dishes with fairly diffuse focal points that were big enough for more than one LNBF to be in the spot, sort of like a not-very-good magnifying glass. But the small K-band dishes we use for DBS have a pretty small spot size, and there's just no way you could get more than one LNBF into the "lit" spot.

What you might get, if you were lucky, is the focal spot of a totally different satellite to light up another head. That's a very desirable thing, and you will see all over the web plenty of people adding LNBFs to their existing parabolic dishes to pick up additional satellites. In fact, it's obviously the idea of the SuperDish or even the D500 itself. But you can't get the same satellites you're already getting with the LNBFs already mounted. Not on K-band, anyway (by which I mean K, Ka, Ku, etc. as opposed to C-band).

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[Jacob S]

This is why I asked this question. I figured one would not be able to pick up the same satellites but would be picking up two different ones and figure it would be cheaper to use singles instead of the twin to pick up neighboring satellites depending on the signal strength and dish size.

[xgrep]

It's possible to add LNBs to get additional satellites, but it doesn't always work too well. The further you are from the center of the dish, the weaker the spot is, because the effective size of the dish is smaller. Imagine trying to look at something in a mirror where you're looking at a very shallow angle through the mirrow. It's much narrower and you may not see all of the object you're looking at.

The other thing that makes it difficult is that it's tricky to set up. You don't know exactly where to put the new LNB to get the best signal, as the new mount is not fixed in a known good position. So you have to play around with it. But once it's set up, it will work as well as it can within the limitations mentioned above.

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[new option]

Just strap them onto the other two lnb's (back to back) of each already existing lnb. The two new lnb's will be pointing under the dish.. This way you can get the channels from Australia (the land down under). or maybe China if you don't aim it right!