Help with Galaxy 23

[asusong]

Hey, new to the forum, and frankly, FTA satellite too. I'm hoping someone here can offer some suggestions on how to improve my reception. This may be long, so, I apologize in advance...

I'm helping a small local broadcaster who wants to broadcast NRB network OTA in Tennessee. We're using a Patriot 3.8m dish, with a WSI ESX211 LNB, and a Cisco D9865 receiver. We've been working on this periodically over several months, with little progress. I bought birdog meter on ebay and was finally able to get the signal locked. At this point we are broadcasting, but the signal quality is only at 33%. We have 84% signal strength at the receiver. The signal is pretty solid, except during bad weather. Which isn't acceptable for a broadcast signal, of course. The other dish at this location is locked on Galaxy 19 and works perfectly in all weather. I feel like if I could get to 50% quality, we'd have no issues. Last thing... This dish was flipped during a storm. The struts were bent, but have been straightened. We've measured the dish to make sure its still round, centered, etc... The only remaining issue from that incident might be corrosion in the feed horn.

So, that's the background... Now the questions...
1) Should I be using a different LNB?
2) Can I clean the feed horn and anodes since they do seem to have some corrosion? If so, how?

I'd appreciate any and all suggestion to improve this signal. I feel like we've tried almost everything.

thanks in advance,
asusong

[jvvh5897]

Hum, with that large of a dish I would not expect trouble in the C band (assuming that the dish flip did not do much to it ).
The LNB is one that bolts to the feed rather than a single one-piece unit and those are usually pretty good (often PLL rather than the puck resonant ones that most of us have). You could certainly buy a C band LNB--they only run $20 buck or so for the low end ones like most of us use and seem to work well. If you are seeing something odd around the probes in the waveguide, then water might have gotten inside and that is bad, but usually the LNBs either work or don't. I'm thinking that if you try to get in there to clean corrosion off , you might mess up the placement of the probes and that would be bad.
Um...maybe recheck your aim at the sat now that you have a lock, recheck the LNB rotation to be sure you have that peeked up too.
Been a long time since my broadcast days using satellite (just translators now days), but I think what you have is pretty good if in good condition.

[Costactc]

3.8m Patriot is overkill on those sats so signal quality should be extremely high. As stated in the previous post a c band lnbf like the esx241 would be essential. If this doesn't work then your flipping of the dish may have caused more harm then you think.

[asusong]

Thanks for the feedback. I was pretty sure the LNB was kind of an all or nothing situation, either its good and works or is bad and doesn't. I know the station owner has some extra lnb's. But I'm probably going to have to spend some time adjusting the dish first. If I can't get any sign increase, I will probably try to swap the feedhorn next, which is an ADL. I didn't mention that before and I don't know the model. Hopefully, one of those will give me some results. The alternative isn't good, meaning, the dish was more badly damaged than we thought.

Thanks again. If you're interested, I'll be sure to post an update when I get to spend some time at the headend.

[Terryl]

Photos of everything will help us out a bit.

How did you check the dish to see if it was not too badly twisted out of shape?

Also the scalar ring/LNB mount may be out of plumb to the dish or bent at the feed-horn transition.

And lastly did you check to see if the skew on the LNB/dish was set right?

And at CATV head-ends we used at least a 5 meter dish, this to keep the weather fades at a minimum, and we always used commercial LNBF's like the Norsat 3120.

[jvvh5897]

Don't get me wrong, that corrosion might be an issue. It could have a different dielectric property than the metal and could induce rotation/absorbtion/reflection inside the waveguide--I would not think it would do much, but I really don't know the dielectric property of metal oxides or whatever might be in there. Could just try to rinse it out with fast drying liquid like alchohol after rinse with water, but I would have a replacement ready to go in rather than expect the rinsed one to go right back into service.

[asusong]

Thanks guys. I'll work on some photos whenever this snow melts. I think the station own had another dish across town at an old site that I might be able to scavenge the feed horn from and I also found some spare LNBs. 3 of which are norsats.