The Advantages of a Motorized Satellite System

Satellite systems for many of us is the source to receive analogue and digital TV. There are viewing cards and subscriptions for a large range of different packages all around the world, you might have one as well and are getting the signals trough a satellite dish. Most likely you have a small dish because that's often all that's required to watch the channels from your country because the beam is strongest around its targeted location. The interesting thing is that if you tried to turn the dish you would be able to get channels from another satellite, like from a different country. The horizon is full of satellites and FTA (Free to All channels) which very possibly don't require a large dish. The main satellites in Europe are Hotbird and Astra which carries loads of these FTA channels in different languages, such as Turkish, French and Russian. It may not sound interesting to watch the foreign channels. Now lets say you would die to watch a tennis match that is not broadcasted on your channels but the match is on a FTA channel on another satellite, wouldn't it be great to watch it? Really there is plenty to watch. Its not that much fun having to go outside and manually move the satellite dish often between satellites. This is where motors come into the picture. There are different to choose from, such as DiSEqC, 36v H to H and actuators. DiSEqC are the most used and they are pretty good for dishes up to 1 meter in size. With this setup it uses your satellite receiver as power that runs on 17v/12v. All receivers have limited output power for the motor as it shares it with the LNB, this means they are slow and not as powerful as H to H motors. Still its a simple upgrade because it uses your existing coax cable that already goes to the LNB on your dish. 36v H to H motors and actuators are stronger built, can cope with higher wind loads and drive larger dishes and they use their own power source and cables via the receivers built-in 36v positioner. Most of the newer receivers don't have a built-in positioner but in this situation you could use a device like the V-Box. The advantage of the V-Box is the positions are stored into it instead of in the receivers software. So all the different motors are made to do the same thing, to track the satellite arc within 180 degrees. It is not possible to go beyond as all the other satellites are below the horizon, meaning they are out of sight. Its a good preparation to plan where to put the dish so trees or mountains are not in the way so you have view to the satellites you want to watch. When everything is setup and aligned correctly the dish will turn to the programmed location as you hop channel. This will open up to a whole new dimension of TV as you can tune into channels from all over the world. Only limit is now the size of dish. Visit Lyngsat to find out which size dish is required from your location for any selected satellite. The larger dish you have, the more channels you can lock a signal.

On the satellites there are also different types of bands, each operating in their own frequencies. C-Band is low frequency and generally requires big dishes. Ku-Band which is the most common, works in higher frequency ranges. Both these bands have Vertical and Horizontal (Linear), Left and Right (Circular) polarization. A LNB type is either Circular or Linear, you can still use both on a dish if you put the two LNB's next to each other. If you choose to do this you should use a 2/1 DiSEqC switch, this will automatically tell the receiver what LNB to select for each type of signal. There are many combination's of dishes, motors and receivers but its not as complicated as you might think. The horizon is full of satellites and channels that everyone can see with the equipment currently available today. Have fun.

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Article written by Koral Wilkins. Want additional information on this topic. See my site about motorized satellite systems.