Advice Needed Norsat C band LNB Vs Get a bigger dish

What she we do?

  • Get a Bigger Dish

    Votes: 7 100.0%

  • Buy the LNB

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    7
  • Poll closed .
P

PrvtN00b

Member
My Satellite Setup
2.4 PF, 1.8 Raven Offset and 1.2 offset for DTV
My Location
Panama Central America
Hi team, a complete noob here, I'm working down here in Latin America for a cable company and they need to have some redundancy with their dish farm, but they don't want to invest in larger dishes because the location is not that big where we can put 12 of 5 meters dishes.

So the problem is that we were able to lock partially one of our main sat which is 58w but some of the HD TP's are not locking, we are using a Raven Channel Master 1.8m to do this job, so we need to decide whether going big or just invest in a new LNB with a better performance.

What the experts here suggest and why?

Thanks.

Note: English is not my native langue so please bear with me.
 
Edwin! Welcome to the Forum. My personal opinion is - bigger dish is always better than mess up with different LNBs, even very expensive ones.
 
How far off in terms of dB are you from locking ?

Or, are the transmissions available at only certain times of day/night ?

Common sense suggests a larger dish to check with, can you borrow one ?
 
Channel Hopper said:
How far off in terms of dB are you from locking ?

Or, are the transmissions available at only certain times of day/night ?

Common sense suggests a larger dish to check with, can you borrow one ?
Click to expand...

Right now, we are missing 2 of the main TP’s, both of them give us 0% of Q and S, other ones gives us around 51% and it doesn’t matter if it is during day time or nights.
 
RimaNTSS said:
Edwin! Welcome to the Forum. My personal opinion is - bigger dish is always better than mess up with different LNBs, even very expensive ones.
Click to expand...

Dude I just came back from the jungle, we need to talk, I will ping you later mate, Thanks!!!
 
PrvtN00b said:
Right now, we are missing 2 of the main TP’s, both of them give us 0% of Q and S, other ones gives us around 51% and it doesn’t matter if it is during day time or nights.
Click to expand...

Q +S hmmmm. Do you have another way of denoting, SNR/bit (Eb/N0)

Are both on the same beam into Panama.

(Are they on opposite polarities ?)
 
Channel Hopper said:
Q +S hmmmm. Do you have another way of denoting, SNR/bit (Eb/N0)

Are both on the same beam into Panama.

(Are they on opposite polarities ?)
Click to expand...

S and Q are just Signal strength and Quality

the Transponders we are missing are these two: 3720 V 30000 and 4000 H 28120

Thanks.
 
OK, so you should be able to get them with a larger dish - I am pretty sure I get it here in UK on my 1.8m CM but it might be marginal.

Signal strength is irrelevant and signal quality is hard to judge as "51%" means nothing. We need SNR figures. The TPs you're after are DVB-S2 with FEC 8/9(!) and 5/6, which means you need at least 10dB to get a lock (even more with 8/9)....

What are the transponders that you do get?
 
Captain Jack said:
OK, so you should be able to get them with a larger dish - I am pretty sure I get it here in UK on my 1.8m CM but it might be marginal.

Signal strength is irrelevant and signal quality is hard to judge as "51%" means nothing. We need SNR figures. The TPs you're after are DVB-S2 with FEC 8/9(!) and 5/6, which means you need at least 10dB to get a lock (even more with 8/9)....

What are the transponders that you do get?
Click to expand...

we get them all, the only 2 who are giving us hard time are the one I mentioned above.

for SNR info I will be able to provide that info later this week as I will be going back with the team to the field again.

Thanks.
 
If you have "PCI-e tuners", download CrazyScan or EBS and try tuning it with those... it will give you SNR readings.
 
How close to the Equator are you? One big problem with going to a bigger dish too close to the Equator is the fact that most dishes over 4 meters are mostly solid dishes, these can be rain and leaf catchers, this can cause signal loss if not cleaned on a regular bases.

Your using a 1.8 meter dish right now for "C" band, this is a bit under sized, so going bigger would be the best solution, I would suggest at least a 3 meter dish in size, (standard for most consumer "C" band setups) you can get some nice mesh dishes in that size range.

And here state side we always recommended at least a 5 meter dish (or larger depending on the location) for the "C" band feeds at cable head ends, this helped with weather fading problems.

Just changing out the LNB may only get you a few more dB in the signal department, (might not be enough) one question, how far away from the receiver's is the dish located and what type of coax was used?
 
we were able to lock every tranponder with the 1.8 offset sadly some of the channels wont show the proper names, we only get something like "noname-3880-200" and during nigth time the signal goes 3 or 4% better overall.

Thanks to everyone we are going to use a 2.4 offset this week.
 
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