Satellite dish

[Suff]

I've been suffering with the satellite reception in this apartment for more than a year now. I've asked the landlord to get the sat installers to tune the thing properly twice now. No joy, half the channels still missing.

So I took matters into my own hands this week. I found an oblong sat disk with a windows mount on ebay, sent from Germany with twin lnb. I also ordered two window routing cables. They are flat and the window can close on them allowing you to avoid drilling the window.

So I picked it up at lunch time and found the cables had arrived today and I could get them from the shop downstairs (dropped by DHL there without my permission), which allowed me to set it up tonight.

I had to use both my sat tuners to get it set up. One is German and is a cast iron bitch to get it to recognise Astra 2e, it thinks it's on 2b and won't be told otherwise. So I used my cheapo Manhattan Plaza to adjust the dish to max signal. Tuned it in and, hey presto, I have all the channels in better quality...

Sadly my Edision german sat box (now tuned in after having upgraded the bios twice and lost all the channels I'd just adjusted once), still won't give me the guide correctly. Then again my MP box wouldn't give me any guide for 3/4 of the channels and it has them all now. So I can now hassle Edision for an update which allows the EPG to work properly. Because the Edision (£35 off ebay), takes my 2 disk usb bay and can record. But it's a real pain in the gonads setting every recording by hand.

However, nice tidy dish, hardly visible over the sill, all set up and running.

Just as it looks like I might be moving out of Brussels and somewhere else....

I should have done this a year ago. I am so lazy and procrastinate so much....

[Workingman]

I was going to do something about my procrastination but never got round to it.

We were not allowed Sat TV in Saudi so some of the electronics guys took things into their own hands. A box and collector were smuggled in in bits by different people then the "dish" was made.

It was a spider's web on poles of different heights set directly into the ground. The math was done so that it "pointed" to Astra. The wires for each concentric circle of the spider's web had to be of the same mass so different diameters and combinations of wire were used. It worked pretty well for a 1990s Heath Robinson job.

The Saudis, looking down from their frequent chopper overflights, never noticed it.

[Suff]

I was going to do something about my procrastination but never got round to it.

My life in a nutshell.....

Talking about the home made dish. I recall helping my friend, space operations from ESA, to try and put his dish back into alignment after it had been knocked offline by the builders.

When we could only get one LNB lined up, he quite literally pulled out paper and pen, knew the orbital distance of the satellites in question and calculated the angle and distance of the two LNB's on the bar and then worked out where he would need to move it to in order to get both LNB's pointing at the two different satellites. The bar was custom made.

I got one LNB up the easy way. I looked at the bright scratch of metal on the pole where it had been pushed aside and swung it back until there was no bright metal showing any more....

Not a mathematical brain mine, more physical and mechanical......