Well, sometimes changing a dish goes smoothly, but not this time, not for me. I was swapping my good old Winegard 76 cm dish with a nice new Fortec 90 cm dish. It's pointed at Galaxy 10R, the satellite with the best English-language content but a relatively weak signal.
I thought that this would be easy. First, I put a stake in the ground to mark the exact pointing angle for the old dish arm. Then off went the old dish, and on went the new one. The first surprise was that my 7/16-inch wrench (see my getting started list) was useless; the nuts appeared to be metric. Oh well, whatever they were, an adjustable wrench still worked on them. I lined up the arm, adjusted the elevation and ... nothing. No hint of a signal.
I tried the usual minor adjustments left-right and up-down. Still nothing. I tried wider adjustments. Still nothing. It was time to get back to basics.
When I was first installing my Ku-band dish, a cheap little signal finder (like the one pictured) saved me. More on that in future blog entries. Anyway, I dug it out and, because it won't work with the universal LNBF mounted there, I dusted off my old original standard LNBF. And I do mean "dusted off"; it had been sitting outside on a workbench shelf for over a year. It looks just like this one, a DMSI ASC321.
Using one of these little signal finders is as much art as science. You turn the knob until the needle on the meter moves to somewhere in the middle, as the device squeals. Then when you move the dish closer to a strong satellite, the squeal gets louder and the needle moves to higher numbers. Adjust the knob to move the needle back to the middle with this stronger signal, and repeat.
Remember when I said that G10R has a weak signal? That meant that it was easy to find every other nearby satellite. By seeing what channels were visible, I could tell when the dish had strayed to AMC 16 or Galaxy 13. That's how I could tell exactly what elevation setting to use and about where to move it east-west. Once the G10R signal locked in, the last adjustment was the optimal position of the LNBF on the arm. I swapped my sensitive univeral LNBF back in, and everything's better than ever.
Lessons learned: Maybe you can't predict direction by the way the dish arm is pointing; the replacement dish's arm was at least half a degree to the right of the old one. Those old standard LNBFs work remarkably well for their low price. And even if you only use it once a year, it's worthwhile to keep a cheap little signal finder around.