|
When I first went on the road I had an older style 3 LNB dish (DirecTV) with three distinct horns and a very simple (crude) mount. When 'aiming' the dish, elevation adjustments were jumpy. I don't know any better way to describe it. You loosen the nuts and the dish flops down a few degrees in spite of your best efforts to hold it. Fine adjustments were mostly a haphazard affair. Likewise azimuth would jump around no matter what I did.
It was like the powder coat had teeth and gentle pressure would build up until you had an earthquake. The dish would jump about 5 degrees to a new set of teeth. I siliconed things. I greased things. I even sanded the mast. Nothing stopped the teeth from creating earthquakes.
Then in an unfortunate case of operator error I managed to ruin the LNB due to an extreme case of dish deceleration. I was at our winter digs at the time so I called DirecTV and they sent out an installer with a new dish. Turns out he wouldn't leave the dish without mounting it on a pipe sunk into concrete at my site. I patiently explained my lack of a crane and showed the gentleman my tripod. Well my pipe was a different size than his pipe whereupon he went off on me about how there was no way he could make that work.
I pleaded with him to just leave the pipe and dish and assured him I would figure out a way to make it work. He would not budge so I bid him goodbye. I was really bummed because the dish he brought had a single horn but by some magic it was also a 3 LNB job and it worked on DirecTV's latest sats (which are very close together - 99,101,103). The coolest part is that it came with a new style mount with coarse adjustments that you lock down, and then fine adjustments that you make by turning long bolts after the coarse nuts are tightened.
I immediately thought of my old (broken) dish with its powder coated teeth and wanted the new dish just for the mount. Bottom line, I went on the net and bought one for less than the DirecTV cost, got a full rebate from DirecTV too. Then with a hammer and a few old credit cards (for shims) I made the new dish work in my tripod.
Now I get on a signal using coarse aiming. Then I lock everything down, making sure I don't lose the signal in the process. Next, I bring the signal to max on all sats using the fine aiming screws.
I don't think DirecTV is serious about serving the RV community, beyond putting some nice marketing materials up on their web site. Certainly, the idea of mounting your mobile dish in concrete doesn't indicate a high degree of RVness, eh?
BTW: Have you noticed all the novel ways people anchor the dish to the ground? There are almost as many ways to do this as there are to 'stabilize' a rig. I've noticed all of these solutions are currently amateur hacks, i.e. nobody has come out with nifty lego blocks or deflatable plastic weights, or nifty tripods with adjustable feet. Seems like there's a whole market out there waiting to be tapped. Makes me go hmmmmmm...
|