Satellite systems have become a popular way to watch analogue, digital and HDTV. There are official subscriptions for different types of packages all around the world, you maybe have one as well and are watching the signals through your dish. Most likely you have a small dish but that’s often all that’s required to watch the channels from your country because the beam is centered around its targeted country. The interesting thing is that if you tried to turn the dish you possibly be able to view channels from another satellite, like from a different country. The sky is full of satellites and Free to Air that does not require a big dish. The most popular satellites in Europe are Hotbird and Astra which carries a large amount of FTA channels in different languages, such as Spanish, Italian and Arabic. It may not sound interesting to tune in to the foreign channels. Now lets say you would really like to watch a sports event not broadcasted on the viewing package you have 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. In the end its not that much fun having to go outside and manually move the satellite dish each time between satellites. This is where motors come into play. There are different types, such as DiSEqC, 36v Horizon to Horizon and actuators. DiSEqC are the most used and they are perfect for dishes up to 1 meter dishes. With this option 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 makes them slow and not as strong as say 36v H to H motors. Its a convenient upgrade as it uses your existing coax cable which already connects to the LNB on your dish. 36v H to H motors and actuators are stronger built, can handle higher wind loads and power larger dishes and these use their own power source via a receivers built-in 36v positioner. Still a lot of digital receivers don’t have this built-in positioner but in this case you could use a device called VBox. The advantage of the V-Box is the positions are stored inside it instead of into the receiver. All the different motors are made to do the same thing, to track the satellite arc within 180 degrees. It is not possible to see beyond this range as all the remaining satellites are under the horizon, as in out of sight. Its a good idea to plan where to put the dish so trees or mountains are not in the way so you have view to the satellites you want to catch. If you get it all aligned correctly the dish will move to the satellites location as you switch the channel. This opens up to a whole new world of viewing as you can tune into channels from all over the world. Limit here is the satellite dish size. Lyngsat is a great source which tells you what dish diameter is recommended in your location for any desired satellite. So the bigger dish you have, the more channels you can view.
On the satellites there are also multible bands, each operating in their own frequencies. C-Band are lower frequencies and generally requires big dishes. Ku-Band which is used throughout Europe, operates in higher frequency ranges. Both these bands have Vertical and Horizontal (Linear), Left and Right (Circular) polarization. LNB’s are either Circular or Linear, you can still combine both of them on the dish if you put the two LNB’s next to one another. If you choose to do this you must use a 2/1 DiSEqC switch, this will automatically inform the receiver which LNB to select for each type of signal. There are endless choices of dishes, motors and satellite receivers but its not as difficult as you might think. The sky is full of satellites and frequencies which anyone can catch with the equipment currently available today. Enjoy!
Article written by Koral Wilkins. To find more details on this topic. Read my page about motorized satellite systems.
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