Dishpointer vs Directv Receiver

In the fine print foot notes, most of those sites will say those suggested settings are just a starting point. You should be manual fine tuning it to get the max signal strength. Depending on the type of dish, LNB and Sat or group of Sats, your best Skew might be anywhere from 70 to 74 in that location; or for some Sats the skew may not matter at all.

pee-paw wrote:
When setting up my DTV HD swm system, I enter my zip code in both receiver setup AND dish pointer on their website but get different SKEW numbers. Receiver reads skew as 73 degrees, dish pointer reads 71.8 degrees. Which is correct?

Directv uses one satellite if you are getting SD service. It uses 2 satellites if you are getting HD service, so skew matters for HD. Some locals, and foreign language programming use a third satellite.

I figure 71.8 can be read as 72 degrees. Try 72, 72.5 and 73 degrees to see which gives the best signal strength. That should tell you which one you should trust.

If you are using a stndalone antenna with multible LNBs, skew is the rotation angle to allow the dish to point at multiple satellites. I understand that Dish network uses multiple sats, while Direct used only one, so skew is meaningless. Travelling north and south with Dish Network, there is very little change in skew. traveling east and west, there is a change, and makes finding all the sats more difficult. Sure sign is when you cannot pick up all the sats at the same time. Most of the automatic, set-out and forget dishes do it automatically.

72. Seriously, I've never found skew to be a very touchy setting, like elevation.