Winegard Trav'ler DirecTV Slimline

az99 wrote:
No mine just kept searching for any satellite if I remember correctly. Just kept spinning and tilting. After about 15 minutes I would turn it off and start over. I think it is very critical to level your unit before starting to search when moving long distances. Also be sure there is absolutely no movement. Like people walking around inside.
I think the unit remembers the positions it was last at and tries to start there for quick setup. When that fails to get a signal it seems totally lost at how to find the signal.

If you observe the dish while it is finding the satellites you can see quite clearly that it first returns to the position in which it last was pointed. This is helpful if you've decided, for example, to stow the dish because of a bad storm or if you wish to "tweak" the pointing after your RV has sat in one place for a while.

If it can't find a satellite at its last position it begins a complete search. The search begins with the elevation set mid-way between max and min positions and involves the dish rotating through 360 degrees at each of several elevations. How long this takes depends on where you are located. For example when we are in Canada and the elevation is quite low, it takes a while because the system won't get to that elevation until it tries quite a few larger ones.

As the system does its search it is constantly checking to see if the many satellites it sees are part of the DirecTV group. It ignores those that are not, but once it finds one of the DTV satellites it will optimize and then identify it. If the satellite found is not 101 it will next try to find 101. If 101 cannot be found the system will return to its search. If 101 is not found by the time the elevation min and max are reached, the system will return to its initial positions and begin the search again.

If the system finds 101, my SK3005 will then try to find 110 and 119. I can't say how the SK-SWM3 system works, but I suspect it still tries to find those birds. Once my system has found either or both of these other satellites it then sets the skew and optimizes it.

On occasion, if the system cannot find either 110 or 119 I have found it useful to put my system into manual mode so it can be made to point at only the 101 bird. The directions for manual pointing of the SK-3005 are clearly provided on page 4 of this user guide: SK3005 user guide I wouldn't be surprised if the instructions for doing this with a SK-SWM3 are similar.