After a full season of touring, we are starting to see the need for improving TV reception. After all, missing Harry Hill on a Saturday night is just unthinkable! So our attention has turned to Satellite reception, but where to begin?
Following a lot of reading on the Internet, researching a lot of forum posts, I have come to the conclusion that we need the following:
- Arcon Multi Prime Focus Dish
- Inverto Black Pro C120 LNB
- Maxview Deluxe Satellite Tripod
- Konig Satellite Finder Signal Meter
- Humax Foxsat HD
- Compass
- Inclinometer
Why the above, well here are my findings:
- The Arcon Multi dish has a very good gain, comparable with 80cm offset dishes, so should be useful when we visit the South of France, whilst still being fairly portable in size.
- The Inverto Black LNB is highly regarded in the field as a quality LNB. So I will replace the standard LNB supplied with this one.
- A dish stand is a dish stand? Maybe, but this one has peg holes and comes complete with said pegs and a storage bag. The centre pole is also pin lockable aiding in stability.
- Konig Satellite Finder, simple inexpensive solution to locating satellites in the sky.
- Humax receiver, highly regarded as a quality receiver latching on to weak signals and giving excellent performance.
- Compass, a simple solution to finding the direction to point your new sat dish at, with the aid of www.dishpointer.com
- Inclinometer, useful on prime focus dishes to calibrate your stand settings.
So, to practise in the back garden! Dish set-up and plugged in, after a few adjustments to the dish, the meter was wailing a tune. Great, in to view the results, nothing, the Humax receiver was just sat there ‘looking’ for the signal. A bit of advice here, if you have the Humax receiver, skip past this initialisation. Even when it tells you your post code is incorrect, get to the main menu. From here select manual tuning, this will give you far more useful information, such as signal strength and more importantly, you’ll see the channels being picked up from the satellite you’ve aligned to. A quick Internet search will reveal the satellite you’ve latched on to. Check where this is and you can make some adjustments to find the satellite you want. A few tweaks later and I had latched on to Astra 28.2 – the wife will be pleased, I can get CSI from anywhere in Western Europe now! Woohoo, or at least I hope so!
A couple of other points:
- Use some Blue-Tack on the LNB F-connector, to stop water ingress.
- Don’t play with the wiring whilst switched on, the cable does carry a current!