Installing a satellite dish

July 5, 2007 12:11 pm Published by

Well I was given a 90 cm satellite dish, LNB, 25 metres of coax cable, a Sky digibox and all the bits and pieces required to hold it all together.

Does it work?

Of course it does! It took a few hours, but I managed to install the dish with no problem and although I’m not subscribing to Sky I have an expired car that lets me watch all the free channels – that’s BBC, ITV, Channels 4 and 5, Sky News…

So how did I know where to aim the dish?

Have you heard of Google? One of the most useful sites was this one. Simply select the satellite you’re aiming for (in my case Astra 2D) and drag the map until you find your location then zoom in for real precision. There are three figures you’ll need to note; Elevation, Azimuth and Polarization.

  1. Use a compass to find the approximate direction of the satellite and find a suitable mounting point for your dish – it needs to be clear of any obstacles.
  2. Attach the wall bracket and install the dish. Adjust the elevation to the figure you noted earlier – there should be a scale on the dish mounting bracket but leave the azimuth adjustment loose enough to be able to swing the dish gently left to right.
  3. Attach the cable to the LNB and mount it on the dish. Connect the other end of the coax cable to the digibox (I’m assuming you’ve already connected this to the mains and TV).
  4. Switch on! You’ll probably get a message from the digibox that there is no satellite signal – if you can, find the menu that allows you to measure signal strength.
  5. By slowly moving the dish left to right (or right to left) millimetre by millimetre find the position where the signal strength is maximum. Tighten the bracket so it can’t move.
  6. Loosen the elevation and fine tune the position so that the signal strength is maximised, then tighten.
  7. You’ll probably be able to pick up the strongest channels now, but we need to do some fine tuning to make sure we get the weaker broadcasts too; loosen the LNB and rotate it slowly. The signal quality should change, but if you get it to around 50 percent or more that’s it! Tighten the LNB adjustment.
  8. You’re finished – except for routing the cabling to tidy it up etc – the hard work is done.

Let me know how you get on with these instructions and get in contact if you need anything clarified, but I think they should work just fine.

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This post was written by David