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Old 11-05-2013, 12:28 PM   #1
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Satellite Dish Aiming.

Over the years I have tried just about every tool on the market for dish alignment. Dishes have ranged from a 18 inch round with one output to an oval dish with 4 outputs to the latest SWM technology. I will attempt to give a basic breakdown of the various tools.
Basic compass. Useful for helping point your dish in the correct direction. It will do nothing helping you avoid obstructions.
Basic signal meter. Will help you tune into a satellite. It will not tell you if you have the correct bird or not. Because a lot of the satellites are very close together, you can very easily lock onto the wrong bird.
Phone apps like Dishpointer. Great tool for allowing you to locate a spot to place the dish and will help you find clear view of the southern sky.
More sophisticated tools.
Align-A-Site. This is a great tool, albeit a bit expensive. Upon setup the instructions tell you to level and plum the tri-pod like in your garage, Mount the dish and set with all angles at exactly zero. Then you permanently mount the base to the dish. This is the last time you actually have to plum the tri-pod. Once the base is installed, you take the settings from your provider for your location and put these angles into the tool. Mount the tool and tilt,skew the dish so that the bubbles are centered and that your dish is pointed in the correct direction. In theory you will then be perfectly aligned. In the real world, it is very close and with some fine tuning you can have a strong signal quickly. One nice feature is the scope you can site through to ensure you have a clear view of the southern sky.
Digital meters.
There are several brands of digital meters. All of this type of meters intended purpose is to lock onto the correct bird and show the maximum signal strength for the best signal reception.
Birdog is probably the most famous of this type of meters. From my experience the big advantages of a Birdog are, you can tell the meter which bird to find, filtering out all other satellites. Other brands claim they can do this, but from my experiences this is not necessarily true. While the Birdog was designed for DirecTV it does work equally well on Dish, Ecostar and most OTA satellites. The nice thing about this type of meters is that you do not have to connect to the receiver. The meter powers the LNB, can be attached directly to the dish via a short piece of coax cable and allows the operator to setup quickly with no yelling back and forth. Once the dish is locked onto the correct bird then you connect the coax cable to the receiver and power the receiver on.
Personally I tend to use three steps. First is Dishpointer to find an open area. Second is the Align-A-Site, mainly because I already own one. Lastly I use my Birdog to fine tune and lock onto the correct satellite. This process takes me usually no more than 10 minutes for my DirecTV HD setup.
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Old 11-05-2013, 01:21 PM   #2
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I guess maybe I'm spoiled. I have a tailgater, so all I do is use the Dish Align app on my iPhone to point it in the general direction of Satellite 129 (the satellite that Dish uses for most of it's HD programs, and the hardest to receive) and the tailgater automatically locks onto all three Dish satellites, 110, 119, and 129. Takes about five minutes total and I'm watching TV!
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Old 11-05-2013, 02:07 PM   #3
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Ah, you are talking about the "Divorce Dish"

went with the winegard trav'ler - cheaper than the alimony !
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Old 11-05-2013, 06:24 PM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnBoyToo View Post
Ah, you are talking about the "Divorce Dish"

went with the winegard trav'ler - cheaper than the alimony !
.

That's good, or maybe not so good, but funny. We went with the Trav'ler also. No more back-to-back sleeping after a Dish setup.

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Old 11-05-2013, 07:42 PM   #5
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Ah, you are talking about the "Divorce Dish" went with the winegard trav'ler - cheaper than the alimony !
Now that's funny, we had an "experience" this past weekend, I bought a signal meter from radio shack on the way out since we always have issues of some sort trying to get a signal, found it useless to say the least, we had a clear view of the sky and fiddled with the dish for about an hour, I got on the iPad and was getting ready to go buy a cube and she said no! We don't need that!...... I said I'm done because this is fixing to ruin my weekend and went on to my other projects, she was persistent and finally got it dialed in (another hour or two, lol) and told me that the app (dish align) is 9.5 degrees off. So we enjoy NasCar, football and even watched a movie. We had some friends out Sunday for lunch and the football game, he has a vucube so I was quite interested in his story about how fast it was to setup, he walked out to our dish and pretended to kick it, we chuckled.............. then he tripped over our coax cable (pure accident) and the tv went blank, we jumped up, grabbed the iphone and set the dish 9.5 degrees off and wallah, signal back in a matter of seconds, I'll try the 9.5 degree off trick next time out. Btw, returned the signal meter on the way home and the guy at Radio shack asked me if it was a I D 10 T problem, I asked what? He chuckled I D 10 T, Idiot, and claims he uses that a lot, surprised he still works there.
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Old 11-07-2013, 11:41 AM   #6
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The 9.5 difference could be the magnetic declination in that area of the country. It would depend on whether the app is giving true north or magnetic north. (The magnetic Noth Pole is not really at the "True" North Pole.) Therfore in MOST parts of the country a compass will not point to the north pole...
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Old 11-11-2013, 05:45 AM   #7
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On the first night of our multiple stop trip it took me over an hour to get the Directv dish lined up. I ended up going several inches to the East on my compass setting and it locked in. What made this stop even worse was our walkie-talkies died. So we had to hollow back and forth. The next stop I immediately setup the dish several inches to the East and was done in about 10 minutes.

I was wanting a Traveler, but after taking 6 trips and stopping multiple times the Traveler would have only been used 2 or 3 times. All the other times the satellites was blocked by trees. I plan on getting a more adjustable tripod and maybe one of the more expensive signal meters. All of this would still be a fraction of the cost for the Traveler.
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Old 11-11-2013, 08:28 AM   #8
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A surveyors tripod fitted with an offset adapter makes life much easier!

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Old 11-11-2013, 11:21 AM   #9
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This is what I am looking to get.

Heavy-Duty Tripod
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Old 11-11-2013, 12:13 PM   #10
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Excellent!!
Have use for last 3 years
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Old 11-15-2013, 11:26 AM   #11
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This is a timely post for me since I just picked up my (new to me) Horizon. It has the Winegard MV-4005 system on it now. But, I am upgrading all the tv's to HD LCDs and plan on using my Directv receiver from home when I travel. I have been wondering what to do about satellite reception since I know that the current dish can't handle HD. And, I haven't seen anything about upgrading it. So, I am either going to change it our for a Trav'ler or use the approach I did when I had my fiftwheel, which was a good tripod with a 3LNB dish mounted on it. It served the purpose, but I didn't have a Birddog so setup was a chore.

I can see pros and cons to both. But, since I have already gone through the "divorce dish" dilemma and got that problem solved once and for all. Now, I will be doing the setup by myself. I can see that automatic set up with the trav'ler would be really great. But, I can also appreciate the fact that getting a clear shot at the birds can be hard with a dish mounted on the coach. It looks like the investment for a portable dish with the items you note would hit close to $1000 which is about $700 less than the trav'ler system. One of my concerns with this setup is the cabling to get the portable system signal into the coach. I have a cable hookup in the service bay, but I suspect that it is RG-59U and not RG-6.

There are trade offs with either choice. Most of my travels will be in areas that generally don't have a lot of tall trees, like the Texas Gulf coast. But, that is not to say that I won't find myself in the Rockies or Pacific Northwest in the next year or two. I would appreciate any insight that anyone has that might help me decide which way to go.
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