[P10] All our yesterdays

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Reception with the 6' dish may be partial but it does offer hope of marginally greater success. I have discovered that there is a small range of options for a much better site for the big dish to the north of the house. Invisible from the road the big dish will pass completely unnoticed.

The iron base has to be moved anyway to make better foundations. This also involves moving a load of cast concrete posts. Which were weighing the base down to protect the dish against rocking in the wind. Or blowing away altogether! Despite my original confidence in the stand it now rocks slightly with firm hand pressure on the mounting. Wind drag on so large a surface easily invites rocking. Particularly when rearward lift is caused by side-on winds using the curvature of the dish. No unlike an old fashioned aircraft wing when placed upside down in the wind.

The dish position I have been using for years is badly affected by the wind. Though this site is also the most convenient for a short cable run to the house. A few extra meters of coaxial cable will do no harm with a high output, Inverto Pro LNB fitted. A hedge is slightly infringing on one side of the present dish position. Which may reduce the signal very slightly. The outer edges of the dish having by far the most area compared with anywhere nearer the centre. The new site offers unobstructed skies at the desired satellite's local altitude.

My idea to use a cheap, round, shaving mirror to check feedhorn alignment worked rather well. First I had to dismantle the rather flimsy, metal framed, shaving mirror. Then I taped the bare, flat mirror absolutely centrally onto the big dish's surface. By climbing a builder's stepladder I was then able to easily check feedhorn alignment. Simply by moving my head, with only one eye open, in a circle around the LNB/feedhorn while watching the feedhorn's reflection in the mirror.

Trying to see if the feedhorn is aligned by looking from the side is all but impossible. There are no visual clues to suggest whether it is pointing at the centre of the dish, or not. These cheap, shaving mirror elements are very thin and lightweight. A couple of pieces of sticky tape, one at the top and the other beneath easily held the weight of the glass. The dish helps by naturally leaning backwards to point at the satellite at 25 degrees altitude. A vertical dish would not offer such security against the mirror falling.

Interestingly, the curved, magnifying mirror element had virtually the same calculated focus as my big dish. (Which I confirmed by focusing an image of the sun on my hand) Unfortunately this mirror produced only a very distorted and highly magnified reflection of the feedhorn when fixed to the dish and seen from behind the LNB.

We are getting only a few short hours of steady pictures and uninterrupted sound around lunchtime. I doubt I can improve much on this rather poor performance with this very old, 6' [180cm] C-band, fibreglass dish. We seem to live under, or very close to, the so-called null line. Which runs north and south right through central Denmark.

To the east of this line there are quite a number of reports of satisfactory reception in the Copenhagen area on quite modest dish sizes. While I know of one, even larger dish than mine, only a few miles east, which gets only slightly longer viewing hours. Morning and evening viewing is still impossible under the null line. There are hardly any reception reports west of us in Jylland/Jutland. When, in theory, it ought to offer far better reception.

Only a much larger dish, or moving home,  offers hope of improved reception over a longer period each day.

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