"Fine Tuning" - not the whole story?

Pages 46 and 47 of the August edition of the Club magazine provides an article about the setting up of a portable satellite system.

Normally, articles of this sort that are published by the Club are excellent, but this one does make assumptions, is incomplete, and probably doesn't work!

The assumption is made that every satellite receiver will work with the EasyFind receiver (LNB) - unfortunately, I believe this is only the case if the box has dedicated software in it to drive the LED's on the top of the LNB.

Incomplete in that the article only mentions about poisitioning the dish in a certain direction - it doesn't mention the angle/elevation, a factor that is as critically important.

Finally, the picture showing the set up screen on the connected television shows a good signal strength, bu a very poor signal quality. On my box, the picture would not be coming through, or if it does, it will be pixellating badly. No mention of the third adjustment needed on the dish which is to skew/twist the LNB until the indicated signal quality is as high as possible.

For setting up the dish angle and skew, there are a couple of good guides from the Maxview website -  http://www.maxview.co.uk/products/SATELLITE_ZONE_MAP.html - and for those users with smartphones, there are applications that will allow you to find the direction of the satellite; some even use the camera on the smartphone so that you can check the line of site as well.

Hopefully, once people are aware of the additional two adjustments that have to be made to the dish, they too can learn to quickly set up their dish!