I cant get any channels on my Nova box!

shardy

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Dear All,

I have a bit of a conundrum for you. My wife is Greek and we wanted to get Nova satellite in London so the kids improve their Greek and my in-laws can keep up with the crisis when they visit. We have a subscription from Greece and my in-laws brought over the Nova box and the activated card.

I bought a 90cm oval dish and with a little help set it up today on the roof of our flat (pointing at Hot Bird 8 at 164.8 degrees azimuth and 29.8 degrees elevation according to http://www.dishpointer.com). After a bit of tweaking I got a signal quality of 90% and signal strength of 60%. I think this must be because about half the dish is covered by a large tree. I ran the channel scan and got nothing.

Anyway, undeterred I bought an in-line amplifier from Maplin and the signal strength increased to 97% and the quality remained at 90%. However, when I ran the scan I got nothing again.

What is going on? The only thing I can think is I have hooked up to the wrong satellite, but I have checked and checked again the direction and it seems right to me.

Have I done something simple wrong? Can I use my HUMAX FOXSAT box that I have for FreeSat to check anything?

Thanks in advance

Stuart
 

Analoguesat

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Take the amplifier off and dont use it - Hotbird puts a huge signal into the UK.

You have 2 possible problems here

The tree is obscuring the dish - in that case all you can do is put the dish elsewhere, remembering trees grow and if you just raise it up then you will have problems in a few years.

the dish is incorrectly aligned - its quite possible you have found 19E instead of 13E.
 

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Or maybe even 9E ...........


I'd certainly say "wrong satellite": General spacing is about 3 deg which is not discernible using compass etc. so alignment needs to be precise.

That said, finding any satellite at all is an achievement and the difference in elevation between adjacent satellites is so small as to mean that you could simply moved the dish the tiniest bit in azimuth to the next strong signal and see if the Nova kit detects anything. If not, return it to the original position and move it to the next satellite the other way.


And my esteemed fiend and colleague is right - bin the Amp. They are for overcoming undue losses on long cable runs. On normal runs, you amplify noise as well as signal and gain (!) no advantage.
 

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The other possibility with an amp on a strong signal is it can put too much signal into the box and overload it causing all sorts of weird effects.
 

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Tivù said:
On normal runs, you amplify noise as well as signal and gain (!) no advantage.

and probably swamp the tuner with noisy signal into the bargain thus stopping it finding any channels at all
 

shardy

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Thanks for the advice. A couple of follow up questions if I may:

1. normally would 60% signal be enough to get a picture?
2. is there no way of finding out what satellite I have connected to? Can I use my foxsay box?

Thanks again
 

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1) should be but hard to answer - its a relative figure different for all boxes.

2) dont see why not - try it and see :D You can get the relevant frequencies from Lyngsat or Flysat
 

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You can use the Foxsat, but it isn't exactly instinctive to use it for other satellites in non-freesat mode.

If I were you, I'd keep it simple and use the Nova box: Just find adjacent satellites until it responds.
 
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shardy said:
I bought a 90cm oval dish and with a little help set it up today on the roof of our flat (pointing at Hot Bird 8 at 164.8 degrees azimuth and 29.8 degrees elevation according to http://www.dishpointer.com). After a bit of tweaking I got a signal quality of 90% and signal strength of 60%. I think this must be because about half the dish is covered by a large tree. I ran the channel scan and got nothing.
Do keep in mind that dishpointer can be out by quite a margin. Finding 28.2E in pretty much same conditions as you when on hols in France had me scratching my head for several hours until I tried moving the dish quite a bit left and right, and found that Dishpointer map indications where out by maybe 5-7 degrees. This meant that using the DP line of sight, I got what was probably 19E or 23.5E, and my FoxSat did show strenght and quality but no channels.

So I can only chime in: Move the dish away from where you're pointing now (probably more to the left), and see for each sat if that's the one.
 

shardy

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Thanks all, I will try to move the dish today as you suggest. One thing that is strange when I run the scan the box says it is connected to 11823 HOR 27500 3/4 which I find out is the frequency for Nova cinema 1. Is this just default settings or does it mean anything?
 

shardy

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Thanks guys, you are genius'! One tiny tweak to the left to the next strong signal and bobs your uncle, 100 channels of rubbish Greek TV (but at least the missus is happy).

I had no idea the satellites were so close together, without your help I would have thought they were just fluctuations in signal from the same satellite.

Thanks again!
 

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Well done.

Maybe a tiny tweak now to elevation and an adjustment of LNB skew (to optimise both polarities).

But, if it ain't broke ............
 
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