Receiving Hotbird with a Zone 2 dish

[Rick]

Ah sorry yes, my bad, your on one of the sky quads, possibly the WNC ? It should be fine as you have set it, but you can try to alter it to squeeze a bit more signal in. If your signal is good enough I'd leave it alone.

On a short run RG6 will work, but the PF100 will be better. You will get less loss over the cable if you use the PF100.

[first attempter]

Thanks for all replies. I've now adjusted the alignment very slightly to squeeze a bit more signal strength and I think this is now as good as I'm going to get it. Having now looked at the channels of interest (Italian speaking) I've noticed that the quality between channels varys a lot. For example RAI Uno, Due, Tre are reasonably sharp but other FTA channels are quite grainy/blurred in comparison. Also on the "sharper" channels there is sometimes a white "ghostline" on the right hand side (as looking at the screen) of a presenter's face. As this is digital TV I'd like to understand if these things are something to do with the quality of the satellite signal reception, or the quality of the signal when it leaves the original source before transmission or just the quality of the decoding of my receiver (Fortec Star Beta) which I suspect might not be the best given the price I paid. (Don't get me wrong I thinks its good value for money). On a grainy channel I've checked the strength bars for that transponder and they are SS 75%, Q 71% and BER 40%. For a sharper channel the figures are SS 76%, Q 80% and BER 19%. I will be grateful for any info which will educate me further. Thanks

[G77]

if its any use to you on my setup the snr differs quite a lot on hotbird.

the best is prob sct at 91% (testing purposes only lol) and the worst is about 60ish

i've got a more than adverage cable run too

[Rick]

The reason for it is that some channels are transmitted with a deacent bitrate. The "grainy" channels as you put it will be minor channels transmitted with a low bitrate. There are some really shocking examples on 13e aswell

[kerrywez]

And some rubbish ones on Thor, but it is a wee bit difficult for us out west.

Regards Wez

[bigtee]

For the "ghosting" check that scart cables are connected properly.

[first attempter]

Thanks for the replies. I understand the point about different channels using differnet bit rates. Re the ghosting perhaps my description is misleading. I have checked and replaced the SCART connections so am reasonably confident they are OK. I've also tried different TV sets and its visible on all of them. I've also used the RF (UHF) out from the receiver and its still visible. Its not there on every scene. Usually when say a newsreader's face is against a darker background and rather than describing it as a ghost it would perhaps be more accurate to say it looks like someone has traced down the side of the face with a white highlight pen. Its watchable though nonetheless but I'm curious why its there. thanks again