Recommended height for a dish

Kashkai

I have 2 walls that can take a satellite dish as follows:

1. Bedroom end of the house where it can be mounted on a pole on the gable wall to face south. This could be situated at a height of about 16 feet. Downside is that all the tvs are at the other end of the house and so I'd have long cable runs up to 40 metres.

2. Living end of the house but the dish would only be 11 feet in the air at most but would be close to all the tv points so cable runs would be no more than 10 metres at most.

Option 2 would be the handiest but would the dish be high enough to see the satellite? There are a couple of branches of trees in the way that could be removed with a chansaw if they would be troublesome with regard to line of sight. There are no other obstacles in the way.

Any advice please?

homer911

The height of the dish is not an issue - you can put it on the ground if you want. The main thing is line of sight to the satellite. There are some guidelines about proximity to trees, but a few branches doesnt sound like much of a problem and as you say, you can prune them back

watty

I fitted one on a 1m pole on ground at back of a garden with 100m of coax run to TV. Working fine

Kashkai

Now thats great news as I didn't want the hassle of 4 runs of up to 40 metres of cable each (not to mention the cost!).

Now for question number two:

The dish I have is one that I inherited from the previous owners of this house. It is an eliptical shaped dish and not the usual circular shaped one. It is a solid steel (or could be aluminium) mesh dish about 60cm vertically by 80cm horizontal. It looks fairly old(ish) but seemed to work fine when I had SKY connected to it for a couple of years. Will this suffice or should I invest in a new dish as they appear to be relatively cheap to buy?

Question 3:
I'm going with free to air but the wife is annoyed as she wants the terrestrial channels as well. I don't want to complicate matters but is there a way to get satellite and terrestrial channels without having a mass of cables? I have conduits in my walls but they will only take a single cable. I have done a bit of research and have seen boxes that can take the feed from a dish and an ariel and run both signals along the same cable to be "unsplit" at the far end. However, whats confusing me is that anywhere I've looked, it says you shouldn't cut a satelite cable if at all possible as it degrades the signal so won't these boxes do the same, i.e. result in a poor quality signal for the sake of getting RTE etc?

watty

Solid is better than mesh.
Bigger is better than smaller.
Shape isn't important.

Cheap dishes have flimsy mounts.

A Solid dish also can be sanded and repainted. You can use almost any spray paint to change colour. Avoid Metallics and high gloss.


The required diplexer (one at each end) does degrade the signal a little. The issue that most people can't fit the F-Connectors professionally, that is why connections are avoided. Also some TV/Sat splitters (splits between 860MHz and 950MHz) are poor.

The TV aerial needs to be on Chimney / Gable end / attic depending on your terrestiral Transmitter. Often the coax then is a different route to the living room than the satellite IF cable.


I have SIXTEEN runs of cable from this dish on the Utility Outbuilding/Shed. There is a motorised dish beside it on a taller pole and then fixed 1.2m dish at the end of the wall/roof.

The 16 coax go to a multiswitch that has a TV aerial port. Depending on destination, some cables are in a plastic pipe buried under the garden, some go round north edge of garden and some round south edge.

The TV combiner port isn't used as the only good place for TV reception is UNDER the row of 70ft/ 25m high beech trees in neighbouring field, so TV aerial only about 2.5m above ground at the backdoor.

It feeds VHS then DVD recorder via loop, then Sky RF in. Main RF out goes to local TV for Terrestrial TV. The 2nd RF out goes to a Sky Eye compatible 4 way amp in a kitchen cabinet. It feeds 2 coax upstairs, one to Kitchen TV and one to another shed. Various satellite receivers, or PCs with multiple satellite cards are fed direct from the Outhouse Multiswitch, except for 2nd sat receiver in Living room used for Motorised Dish / blind search and feed reception.

The TV has 2 SCART but only one has RGB, so mechanical all wires switched 4 WAY SCART switch (£5) takes 2x Sat receivers, S-VHS and the DVD player/Recorder.

Sound goes to a 5 ch amp direct from each gadget as it has its own input selector.

Kashkai

Cheers for the info Watty. That is some set up you have and way beyond what I'd be confident of doing myself. However, i do feel that I'll be able to set up the dish to get free to air channels and if this goes ok, then I'll try a splitter on one of the cables to see if I can successfully get a good signal from an ariel for terrestrial channels. Would you be able to recommend a good splitter that won't degrade the signal too much?

One final thing though, with dtt on the way, am I wasting money looking into getting an analogue ariel and should I hold off for a dtt ariel. Any idea when dtt will be available, I'm in Kildare btw?

Nothingbetter2d

we currently use a uhf external antennea to tune in rte digital from mount leinster in carlow on a pc (needs a tv tuner that can tune mpeg4 -- hauppauge hvr 4000 works perfectly with dvb dream software - wintv bundled software doesnt work yet though hauppauge are working on a new version that will eventually support dvb-t mpeg4 standards)

John mac

One final thing though, with dtt on the way, am I wasting money looking into getting an analogue ariel and should I hold off for a dtt ariel. Any idea when dtt will be available, I'm in Kildare btw?

I think its the latter part of this year.
unless you can get a signal from Three Rock, Clermot Cairn, Mt Leinster.

chris1970

jez watty your missus must be happy with you!, a gaggle of lnb's,
question for you got 80 cm dish , a mono block lnb aiming 13 and 19 , need to get signal for hd freesat at 26 degrees, is there a way without getting motor etc, what angle /where could i put another lnb on at? cheers

watty

Mono blocks are hard to add another LNB to as the switch is internal. Also the signal is poorer than two separate LNBs as they are fixed spacing for Germany. The Spacing in Ireland for 19E and 13E is different.

Freesat is 28.2 / 28.5

Look at my photo.

That is an add on Triax arm

0___0___0_|_0

28.2, 23.5, 19, arm, 13E

So you leave out the 23.5
0_______0_|_0

28.2, gap, 19, arm, 13E

Use a Quad for the 28.2 so you can have a PVR later and/or a second receiver.

You also need a four way DiSEQC switch. Replace the Monoblock by two ordinary LNBs.

chris1970

Cheers watty , will try that got a spare lnb and 'mcguiver' it with a few cable ties, see how it goes, let you know