Used Satellite Dishes?

Patrol 65 wrote:
This is how I manually tune my Directv antenna. I set the dish antenna on the tripod and I go to the setup menu on my receiver and tune to either the no. 8 or no. 7 transponder on satellite no. 101 and maually move the dish up and down, side to side towards the location of the sat.101 and wait to hear the loudest signal strength pinging from the satellite receiver. Then I fine tune it while screwing it down to the tripod. It takes 5 to 10 minutes.

Why do,you use transponder 7 or 8? My receiver defaults to transponder 1, so I just use that. Is there a benefit to going with 7 or 8?

Bruce

Call Kingdome, they sometimes have recondition ones. However it will not be HD for DTV.

Otherwise, learning to setup a tri-pod takes someone willing to show you how. After that it is easy. I take 15 minutes to assemble, setup and aim the HD SWM dish

Craigslist NC has this one.
I bought mine off craigslist about 3 years ago. Has worked great

This is how I manually tune my Directv antenna. I set the dish antenna on the tripod and I go to the setup menu on my receiver and tune to either the no. 8 or no. 7 transponder on satellite no. 101 and maually move the dish up and down, side to side towards the location of the sat.101 and wait to hear the loudest signal strength pinging from the satellite receiver. Then I fine tune it while screwing it down to the tripod. It takes 5 to 10 minutes.

I may be selling our KVH Trackvision R4

I have a KVH LM I'm going to take off my RV. Email me if interested. snomas@peoplepc.com.

There are automated systems that can locate a Directv SD signal for around $500, but for HD it is closer to $1800 installed on rig's roof.

When we installed a couple of flatpanel HDTVs in our rig a few years back we dumped our 18" round Directv SD dish and picked up a used HD sat dish that matched the dish we have installed at home. Just bring HD receivers from bedrooms at home.

Mounted the Directv HD dish from Ebay on the same home-made stand and found the process no more difficult than aiming the 18" SD Directv dish as we still just lock in sat 101 with a 90% or better signal utilizing nothing more than a keyring compass.

Just make certain the HD dish is set to receiver indicated values and mast is level. I guess we have lots of practice as we have been doing it for a number of years with the SD dish and it takes maybe 10 minutes tops with a clear shot of the southern sky.

We camp too often where we might need a 100' (or more) of coax to lock on a signal through the trees so a rooftop dish wouldn't serve much purpose. Even use satellite when an RV park provides cable tv since channel selection is sparse and cable signal is weak providing substandard picture by comparison.

At the Redmond FMCA rally King gave me $200 trade in on my POS 9760 dish. The show price on their Flex was $500 and in OR there is no sales tax so $300. Have not used it yet and I'm going to rig it so I can mount it on the roof of the MH where I can take it off if needed. I would suggest you get the App SAToolz for your smart phone. Makes finding a hole in the trees easy and it will get you in the right direction without a compass.
Ebay

10forty2 wrote:
Thanks everybody. I'll probably just invest in an inline signal meter for $10 and enjoy the extra $390 for fuel... ;-)

You could enjoy $400 for fuel easily by using the sat box as your meter. You will eventually anyway.

Get a used dish at a yard sale cheap, and build you a low-to-the-ground, stable base for it, all under $50. Lots of people have, so there are many designs to use for the base. Wood, plastic pipe are some of the materials. Most critical is the LNB on the dish. Aiming is simple, and a lot less than the hundreds of dollars that folks can spend on automatic ones. Some of us have to make do with a lot less, but get as good or better reception for free. I have posted pictures several times here, and so have others.