Vladimir's Tech Blog

Few months ago I decided to install satellite dish at my parents’ house. The terrestrial antenna that they were using to receive local and national TV stations in Sevojno, Serbia was kind of problematic, as they were receiving signals from several different physical location, and it was impossible to pick up all channels with optimal quality only with one antenna. Of course, I am talking here about analog terrestrial TV, as DVB-T is not a mainstream in Serbia yet. However, we all expect this to change soon, as all members of EU agreed to stop analog broadcast until 2012, and for the rest of Europe, Middle East and Africa the deadline is set to Jun 17th, 2015

Instead waiting for 2015 to get spice of digital TV in my hometown, I decided to spend few bucks and surprise my elders with satellite TV installation. In my apartment in Brussels I am using Triax 110 cm dish with Stab HH 100 motor, but this solution was not suitable for my parents’ house as I wanted to have possibility to connect at least 2 TV sets which should be able to receive channels from different satellites at the same time. After some online research, I figured out that the best solution could be one of the multi-focus dishes where I could install several LNB’s. As my dad was used to watch just handful of TV stations, I realized that there is no point confusing him with dozen of satellites and thousands of channels that are receivable in southeast Europe. Instead, it would make sense that they are able to receive majority of channels in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian language (which is actually same language with few different names) and also two main satellites over the European sky – Astra 1 at 19E and Hotbird at 13E. As ex-Yugoslavian channels are mainly broadcast from Eutelsat W2 at 16E and Thor/Intelsat at 1W, all together I had to make them possible to receive total of 4 satellites. On the other hand, the second TV set is mainly used by me and my girlfriend when I am in town. As certified geek and technology freak I would definitely not be happy with only 4 receivable satellites.The reasonable option was to go for 8 satellites, as I am not spending too much time in Serbia anyway, and going for more than that would increase the price of the system. Anyway, the intended usage of this system was actually to watch TV (what a surprise)! I am saying that, because with my other motorized dish in Belgium I am doing everything else except really watching program – instead I am chasing different feeds, experimenting with file download over satellite, trying to receive far west and far east satellites just for sake of being able to receive one single channel from Azerbaijan or Bolivia for example. I will write about these tests on this blog as well in following weeks or months.

The dish of choice for this project was Wave Frontier T-90 Toroidal dish. This antenna allows mounting number of LNB’s that can be spaced at minimum 3 degrees, and it is advertised to cover horizontal angle of 40 degrees. However, I saw some folks on net that did slight modification of LNB holders to cover angle up to 60 degrees. I bought 2 DiSEqC switches – one with 4 ports for my dad’s TV and other one with 8 inputs for another TV. Also, I took 4 LNBs with one output and another 4 LNBs with 2 outputs. Finally, I had old Dreambox 7000 lying around (as I replaced it with DM800 HD few months ago), so I just bought one more DM500, so we have two receivers in total. Again, I was going for cost effective solution, and going for more expensive HD receivers at this point of time was not really a good idea.

On the photos you can see how the installed dish looks like – for some of my neighbors this was quite fascinating as they never saw similar dish. One funny guy even asked me if this is some kind of radar or if I am trying to search for extraterrestrial forms of life. :-) However, the installation was bit painful as the dish itself has millions of screws and other small pieces, so it took me couple of hours to assemble it. I guess it would be bit faster if my dad didn’t help me as he was constantly making mistakes and putting wrong pieces together. One important point to mention is that you need mounting pole of exactly 60 mm in diameter, and that dish itself is placed directly on the top of the pole (as you can see on the picture). This time my dad was quite useful as he modified the cheap balcony dish holder and replaced the 40mm pipe with the wider one, and finally painted the complete holder with rust protecting paint. Thanks, dad!

All together, I selected following satellites:

TV 1: Thor/Intelsat (1 west), Hotbird (13 east), Eutelsat W2 (16 east) and Astra 1 (19 east)

TV2: Thor/Intelsat (1 west), Eurobird (9 east), Hotbird (13 east), Eutelsat W2 (16 east), Astra 1 (19 east), Astra 3 (23.5 east), Astra 2 (28 east) and Hellas-Sat (39 east)

Someone could question my choice of satellites, but I am quite happy with this selection. I know that there are at least few other satellites with quality channels that I could include, but this is more than enough for occasional TV watching.

The 4 LNBs with 2 outputs are installed at positions that are receivable on TV1, and 4 other LNBs are used to receive remaining satellites for TV2. Installation of LNB’s and aligning of the dish itself was piece of the cake. In this setup, I selected Eutelsat 16E to be central satellite as it has proportionally the weakest signal, so I wanted to maximize the performance putting that LNB in the “bull’s eye” of the T-90. I connected that LNB directly to the receiver, tuned to one of the frequency from Eutelsat W2, and start moving the dish left-right and up-down until I got the signal. Then, I tried to find the best possible signal for border satellites at 1W and 39E by sliding those LNBs left and right on the LNB holder, and also by twisting the dish clockwise and counterclockwise. When I was happy with signal on all 3 satellites, I simply positioned other LNBs to get the best possible signal, without moving the dish anymore. Instead of using this blind search method to position LNBs, you can use the Toroidal Calculator from this link, but I didn’t find it necessary to use at all.

I installed each LNB by connecting it directly to the receiver, to avoid messing up with the switch configuration. When the dish and LNBs alignment was optimal, I connected 4 outputs of twin LNBs to the switch 1 which is going to TV1, and 4 outputs from single LNBs and remaining 4 outputs from twin LNB’s to switch 2.  The configuration of the receivers to work with DiSEqC switches was another nightmare, but it took me couple of hours to figure out how to do that, and I wrote separate article to describe DiSEqC 1.1 configuration.

All together, my elders, my girlfriend and I are very satisfied how the system works. I like fast switching from one satellite to another without waiting for the dish to turn, and without the engine noise which can be quite unpleasant especially in the middle of the night. Actually I am thinking to buy one more T-90 dish and install it in my apartment in Brussels, but probably this time I will go for mix of T-90 with 15 LNBs and motor, so I still have motorized dish available to search for feeds or satellites that are beyond the horizontal coverage of T-90. If I decide to upgrade my system, I will dedicate a post about that too. Another thing that I will test is the signal strength difference between the LNBs in central and edge positions. The manufacturer claims that Wave Toroidal T-90 dish is equivalent to simple 90cm dish at any LNB position, but my subjective experience is that LNBs in central position have much better signal than those at the edge of the LNB slider. Of course, stay tuned to my blog to read about that!

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