Should I....Shouldn't I....Should I....Shouldn't I....

[alcina]

Newbie trying to assemble kit here! Thanks to the gentle but firm persuation from you guys I have abandoned the Maplin "kit" at £70 idea and am concentrating on assembling a much better system for, hopefully, only marginly more...

I'm looking at the dish at the moment. I have an opportunity to get a 1.4m jobbie (I believe that size is important here!) for £10 off eBay - It is local pickup which happens to be just 20 miles from where my bro-in-law lives...and he has a people carrier with removable seats! I just then have to worry about getting it down from Lincolnshire to London...in a Ford Fiesta...(might have to rethink that one...)

My question is.....should I try for it? I'm concerned that for a newbie it'll be, quite literally, too big to handle. Would I be able to shift it if I decided not to keep it? I somehow think that even the local light-fingered yoofs may balk at nicking 1.4 meters of dish and I don't want to be stuck with a very large white elephant. On the other hand...1.4m is some impressive wingspan, and £10 is peanuts (ahem...I'm deliberately not thinking about the possible transport cost of getting it to London...) and size is important and it seems like a fantastic opportunity and is there such a thing as "too big"? Equally I can pick up a 1m dish for around the same price in London....but...1m isn't 1.4m.....

My interest at the moment is simply pulling in French and German channels, though the idea of finding feeds interests me greatly simply for the geek factor. I appreciate that all I need to do this is about an 80cm dish....but when did "need" ever come into it? I'm presuming that if I want to motorise the dish (necessary for feed hunting) then getting a motor to drive a 1.4m dish is going to be a whole lot more expensive that one to drive a 1m dish - can anyone give me ball park figures as this may be the decider?

The item is question is: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...MEWA%3AIT&rd=1 I am aware that the auction has finished, but no-one bid...and he may be willing to sell still (or put it on again) and I just don't know whether or not to try for it

If it makes any difference I'm likely to go for a Technomate 1000D receiver @ £60.

It's the age old problem of I vacillating between desire and sense.... :?

Help!

Alcina

[Jimdefruit]

Are you likely to get any aggro from neighbours? At 1.4 M you may find yourself being forced to get planning pemission by nasty neighbours.

I personally would go for the 1 M dish even though mine is 1.2 M.

[Mickha]

Hi alcina,
it all depends on where you intend to situate this dish, if it's on a wall mount, go for a quality 1M or a Triax 88 cm dish, if you have a clear line of site from a ground mount then it might be worth playing with. Seeing as you are located in London you should get a good quality of signal on the vast majority of the satellites, with an 80 cm dish, or less, so a 90cm - 1M motorised set up will bring you a great deal of satellites.
Please post back, with details of where you intend to mount this dish and what clear line of site you have, e.g. 45 E to 45 W.
Best wishes
Mickha

[BGonaSTICK]

There you go.

I'm sure my colleagues are right on this one.

It's a no-brainer Alcina (and you know that deep-down already, right? ).

It's just not very practical, especially for a beginner.

Assuming you motorise (mandatory for feed-hunting really) you would need an extra box of tricks called a VBOX to control the driving of it (another £50 - £60) and maybe a new adjustable stand to get the pole vertical. Then a polar mount, another £100 new (complete guess) if you can find one. Now add an actuator, maybe £50 and some extra motor cable.

You'll probably need some concrete somewhere too.

Planning permission aside, your neighbours would probably flip. You need to stand next to one to fully appreciate why. Tuning is more difficult on a larger dish also.

I've just seen a DiSEqC motor advertised on eBay 'suitable' for a 1.4m dish. No way. Just don't even think about it! It's simply not at all suitable.

You have to take the pragmatic approach here. For French and German channels you're talking 19.2E and 13E, both of which can be achieved with plenty to spare by an 80cm dish.

Feed hunting doesn't just mean weak signals. Many feeds are high-powered signals from satellites between 30E and 30W. You only need a large dish to get signals off of the more far-flung and weak satellite beams like say some of the Russian stuff or maybe some of the Nordic or Arabic programming.

My advice, especially if you're on a tight budget is to start simple and grow into it.

Having said all that, if you don't mind the hassle and cost of transporting, have plenty of muscle on hand to help you install it and will never motorise it, then you could take a chance with the neighbours dobbing you in.



STICK

[alcina]

As I have a Victorian house whose brickwork I'm not too sure about, I was intending to floor mount it on my patio in my back garden. The front of the house faces practically directly South so I figure if I put it at the very end of the back garden I should clear the roof and be able to direct it slightly down the side (west) too as there's a big gap there before the next house. East is reasonably clear too providing the satellite isn't too low. The other alternative would be to put it in the front garden, but I'm not too sure the local light-fingered yoofs would leave it there unmolested Not to mention it would look a bit odd stuck in the middle of a "Cottage Garden"!

My neighbours are Turkish and have two massive satellite dishes (easily 1m if not more) on their wall (on a south facing wall, they're on a bit that juts out on the east side of their house, the jutting bit itself facing directly south - the coresponding jutting bit on my house being on the west side of the house...damn a picture would work well here!) bringing in, from the sounds that eminate through the living room walls, 24 hour Turkish Television, so I presume they wouldn't complain about a dish in my back garden! And for the other local residents, a precedence has been set by the Turkish satellite dishes! :spite:

Originally Posted by BGonaSTICK

It's a no-brainer Alcina (and you know that deep-down already, right? ).

You're right, you're right....but I know that at 4am I'll be dreaming of Jodrell Bank again...why is life full of difficult decisions? If I got the 1m one I'd feel better about wall mounting it on the jutty-out bit, but that would severely limit my eastward searching...though I'd have pretty much due South and everything to 90W...if the mounting arm is long enough so stop the dish hitting the wall as it turns on its side! So probably the 1m dish would on the patio too. Now why didn't those Victorians think about these things when they built the houses?

Sigh..."No Alcina, No...Put the sweeties back on the shelf...."

Alcina

[Jimdefruit]

You will kick yourself if you can't get any satellite East of South.
Without the east satellites, you will be limited to a few useful channels mainly at 0.8 W (Thor) and 30 W (Hispasat). There are several others some of which regularly transmit programme feeds but the most interesting satellites, at least for me, are 0.8W, 5E, 10E, 13E, 16E, 19.2E and 28.2E.

Having said that 30W channels can be cleared at present but don't know how long that will last.

[Analoguesat]

alcina, whilst most blokes will tell you that bigger is better..... no cheeky comments folks please.... you can do handy things with dishes in the 80-90cm range too, and you shouldnt dismiss 80cm dishes.

Have a look at my digitalsat website (www.digitalsat.co.uk).

The vast majority of the channels listed on the site are available on my assortment of very scruffy, very battered secondhand 80cm dishes

[MrGlum]

I KNOW NOTHING !! but....

I pulled this off some explanatory site [not forum]....

"Choose your dish carefully. The size of the dish should be optimized for the satellite(s) you wish to receive signals from. Don't choose it too small, but don't choose it too large either. In both cases the TV image will suffer. With a too small dish, you don't get enough signal, with a too big one you get too much. And too much isn't good for the quality of your TV image either."

I heard big being more differcult to position than smaller but not that could cause a lose in signal quality.

Paul

[BGonaSTICK]

Originally Posted by alcina

Sigh..."No Alcina, No...Put the sweeties back on the shelf...."

LOL...

1m Triax, bottom of the garden. That sounds about right. Motorise it now, or when more funds are available.

Then buy a poster of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope and stick it on the inside of your window

[MrGlum]

I KNOW NOTHING!! but....

It may be wortha tenner just so your neighbours see you being reasonable. Its a bit like 'Planning Permissions' - you put in something overthetop/outrageous. Your neighbours go ape**** and exhaust themselves [winning their case]. You put in an amended application and it goes through because every opponent got so frenzied by the first application that they just can't do it all over again. I got f**ked by this particular scenario but that doesn't mean I haven't learnt a lesson which I generously give to you