How much difference between SD and HD

PennyPA wrote:
This is getting entirely too complicated at this point especially since I don't know how we'd tell whether the skew was off in addition to the azimuth.

I get the sense that you're trying to point your dish without much of an understanding of what you are doing and are then getting frustrated as a result. If you understood the process you would know that azimuth and skew are not related and that the setting for one is completely separate from the other. For the newer SWM dishes skew is not that big a deal since the LNBs for 99 and 103 are located so close to the 101 LNB. I can get quite a few HD channels without even setting the skew and simply pointing the dish at 101.

I honestly think Bill Adams is correct and that you have a faulty component in your system which is preventing you from getting a signal. That's what happened to me last year, the first time I was setting up my tripod dish. I had a bad coax connector and, as a result, no signal was getting to the receiver. I got a DirecTV installer to come out (to my RV) and he was able to get me up and running in less than 10 minutes once he found the bad connector.