Lidl Satelite Kit - £59.99

Yeah it's really easy to install and tune in. You just need a bit of patience.
My dish points towards Atlantic Bird 3 (5 West) where I get both analogue and digital channels using 2 different boxes.

shere1 wrote:

Martini.

I have been given a Technomate digital FTA receiver by someone who has bought a fancy dreambox. Could I point my old 60cm Sky dish (with a universal LNB attached)towards Hispasat and use this receiver to get a few channels ?

Also when you set the satellite dish do you first find south and then take it xx degress to the left (for East) and right (for west)?

Thanks in advance.

Shere1
A 60cm dish is too small for Hispasat (unless of course you are in Spain).
An 80cm - 1m dish would be better.
Look here for satellites available with an 80cm: http://www.digitalsat.co.uk/whichsatellite.html
and Hispasat footprint:
http://www.geo-orbit.org/westhemipgs/fhsp12p.html
The 3rd map down shows you the recommended dish size quite clearly!

With setting the dish what you state is "basically it" but you also require the correct elevation and need to take into account the magnetic variation (magnetic N is not N) at your location. When I set my motorised dish up
finding Thor at 0.8W was easy for me as it was "just W of S" but over in Liverpool for example it would be just E of S and there dish would point lower into the sky than mine! Dishes at the equator point straight up as the satellites are 35,800km above them.

With some patience I can recieve Hispasat 1C and 1D at 30 west using the Maplin suitcase with its 39 cm dish in Birmingham. (with the supplied 0.6dB noise factor LNB)

In addition to pan and tilt, if you're going a long way east or west of south the elevation reduces, and also adjust the LNB rotation a bit too for optimum signal strength as it's effectively on an x-y mount, not polar.

Somewhere there is a site you can put in your location and satellite of your choice and it gives backtrue or magnetic bearing, elevation and skew (block rotation) but I'm blowed if I can find it at the moment due to new OS and lost all my bookmarks.. Will post it later if I find it but work calls.

shere1 wrote:

Thanks novice saver,

I think I will try messing with my old Sky dish and see if I can pick hispasat up.

I think http://www.satsig.net/maps/lat-long-finder.htm#start-of-lat-long-map is the site you are reffering to.

Thanks, yes that's the one: bookmarked again...

It still worked this morning, but had to dodge the showers



the image is rather soft, as it's cut from a 1248x960 original (from an Aldi 1.3 mega pixel camera)
the closer images I took just dim the image in bands as the scan rate of the TV and camera are poles apart.



One final point, some of the preset channels in my receiver weren't valid at the time I was trying to find things. Check your channel list with Lyngsat and make sure you're tuned into something that's transmitting, or you'll nver find anything.

Once you've found it and peaked the signal, do a scan for (free) channels.

Same is true for other satellites too.

We bought a Lidl satellite the other day, tuned it in with a compass as directed by various sites but cannot get above 34% signal strength and 11% signal quality. Not enough for a picture. Theres no obstruction, its on a flat roof and the nearest tree is 100 yards away. We have tilted it 26 degrees from vertical.
Any ideas, or should we get a refund? We are in Poole on the south coast, by the way.