Broken gear in motor

[andy29]

Recently my motor has got more and more hit and miss about whether it will turn or not, and now it's stopped completely. I had a look inside and this is what I found (see attachment). Yes, that is a great big hole in the gear - eek! So, err, yeah... I think that might be the problem. It did at least four and a half years and it's been good, if a bit touchy.

More worrying though is that I've tried taking the motor inside off and it still won't do anything on its own, like it's completely dead, except occasionally when I can make it move a tiny bit. Could that just be down to the position sensing being messed up? I have tried disabling the programmed limits. If it wasn't for that I was thinking about asking if anyone has a bad motor but which is still with an intact gear...

 

[timbo86]

I would just replace it with the Technomate 2600 which has metal gears inside. Job done!

 

[satelliteman]

Yes agree, replacing it would be simpler, either the above or the 2300 model.

 

[hexah]

Good photo.

Four and a half years is a reasonable life outdoors.

 

[andy29]

Okay, thanks for the recommendation, I reckon I'll just do that then. I thought one with metal gears would have cost a lot more than they do.

So with USALS, you tell it your latitude/longitude, and it will calculate the angles of the satellites for your location. You then use the memory numbers to go to the satellite you want, right? But receivers seem to also let you move to an actual angle rather than a memory number... is this what go to x.x is? Is it still part of USALS? If a motor does USALS and go to x will it also do this? Or will telling it to go to zero degrees make the motor move to zero degrees whatever longitude you're at?

With the old one I gave up on the memories in the end and settled on driving to angles. Every so often these would shift and I had to work out how many degrees to add to get to where I wanted (eg. most recently I was telling it to go to 63 east when I wanted 28 east) - but it worked. I don't know how much of it was down to me being too thick to understand how it's meant to work, but it was set up right as far as I could see and surely the angles should never shift if nothing else has changed. I presume this will be a thing of the past with the replacement unless it's duff!?

 

[satelliteman]

So with USALS, you tell it your latitude/longitude, and it will calculate the angles of the satellites for your location. You then use the memory numbers to go to the satellite you want, right? But receivers seem to also let you move to an actual angle rather than a memory number... is this what go to x.x is? Is it still part of USALS? If a motor does USALS and go to x will it also do this? Or will telling it to go to zero degrees make the motor move to zero degrees whatever longitude you're at?

The memory numbering refers to DiSEqC 1.2 commands as is move East/West. GotoX will calculate a satellite position based on a reference (your long/latitude). You can calibrate/send the motor to zero at any time.

 

[andy29]

Just wanted to say thanks for the help. The dish was going rusty in places so I took the chance to clean the whole thing up. I now have a TM 2600 and a newly painted black dish, all working fine. Yes, the old motor's USALS was obviously screwed, but at the time I didn't know if it was just me. Lovely.

 

[satelliteman]

Nice result.