It did not - awful wind with showery sideways rain, which means I had to leave the majority of equipment inside the house.
I wanted to see how far I could get with the current setup without hacking anything. 58W was a given since I originally tuned the positioning of the jack arm and its holder to swing between 58W and 55E. There's also the limit of the 24" jack.
I knew that 63W had some data streams available in Ku so I went on the hunt and bingo!
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The jack was fully compressed at this point and a couple of clicks away from running into its own limit so that had to be relocated.
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Thankfully the picket fence looked like it wasn't going to get in the way, so nothing to do there.
After drilling another hole in the jack arm er... arm and hacking away part of the PM's frame with the grinder, I set about hunting.
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First I needed to find approximately where 70W was and I had no idea whether I had clearance, uninterrupted lined of sight or any signal. I parked the dish on 63W and moved it as far west from there as it would go. After a lot of huffing and puffing, I found what I thought was some signal fumes on my F15 from 70W.
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A few transponders were showing signs of life, so I connected the LT8700 receiver.
Nothing. At. All.
After about an hour of huffing and puffing, I thought I'd check the LNB output on the receiver with a multimeter. Both polarities were showing 18V
So I was stuck with horizontals. I knew that the tuner was OK, since it works with HackTV.
I checked the LNB settings and found that "C" LNB was set to 18V on input A and 13V on input and some odd LO. It was obviously used on a fancy setup back in the day. After correcting the errors of my ways, I saw some signs of life on analogue transponders. It was hard to see whether it was noise/interference from mobile networks or actual signal but cranking up LT to max suddenly revealed a watchable picture! Jackpot!
I managed to get a video from quite a few transponders but the low elevation of the satellite was an issue as I had some visible interference and the picture kept disappearing for fractions of seconds - almost like LT dropped out. This was especially evident in the low 3700 range.
I am sure there's more signal to be eeked out as I didn't play much with the LNB other than screwing it to the dish! And I don't have John's NASA level adjustments to skew, LNB position, feedhorn etc. etc. Not to mention the awful weather (though C band is less affected by rain). The LNB itself is also not in focus - it's sitting above the Ku LNB and I use the declination jack to compensate. I would like to see if I can sniff out a digital transponder as well.
For anyone who wants to try it - do. There's no way in the world I should be able to receive this satellite in the UK. The 1.8m dish is far too small but with Echostar's magical threshold extension, it's just about possible. I suspect without LTE, it would probably require a 3m dish to get a watchable picture.
@moonbase - can I join the floater 3 brigade?
Here's a clip of the ANALOGUE scan on 70W - 11 years since I last did it in the wild! I used my CRT monitor as the LCD one kept blanking out bad signal. Not sure why it's B&W here...
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Need to try the Titanium that's also in the package.
