Astra 2E/2F Technical Thread

[pip24]

Mogs we are about 30 mins from you but we are not there at the moment so we dont know what our reception is .

What size dish are you on ?

[Martin963]

[quote user="mogs"]I have lost all channels this morning although it was fine first thing. I'm hoping it's just a weather issue. I'm located near Gourdon, anyone else having problems in this area?[/quote]

How big is your dish mogs?   You say "all channels" - have you still got ITV and channel 4 or did you mean just the BBC channels?

 I wouldn't have expected you to have any problems unless you've only got a Sky minidish or a not-too-well-adjusted 60 cm dish.

[Martin963]

[quote user="soupagirl"]

Lost all BBC as of Thursday night, we thought it was due to high winds. Himself was on the roof all day yesterday tweaking the satellite but to no avail. then I looked on the forum and found this thread.

We are in the Landes, with a 1m dish.

[/quote]

After all the tweaking have you still got ITV and channel 4?   All I can suggest is that you get them back as well as possible (have a look at the signal quality indicator,  not the signal strength) then just try adjusting the skew of the LNB - assuming Himself hasn't done that already.   Loosen the collar holding the LNB and try rotating it a little to peak the quality indicator.  Then try the BBC channels again.

If that doesn't work (and I'm not hopeful) it sounds as though you need a bigger dish,  are you north or south Landes?   The reason I ask is that it looks as though the fall-off as one goes south is very sharp,  and I'd half expect a 1 m dish to have worked in the northern reaches of 40.

Final question - have you (had you?!) got channel Five's stable of progammes?

[soupagirl]

Signal strength/ quality 90% / 85% respectively, best we usually can achieve, after yesterday's tweaking. In the southern half of Landes, between Mont de Marsan and  Dax.

Have all ITV channels, Ch 4 lot too.  Oh and of course Al Jezera and the Bollywood channels. Not sure whether we had Channel 5 to start with - I think it was on the Humax channel list but don't think we watched it......but we definitely don't have it now. But we do have BBC RB2 which I don't think we had before.....so we CAN watch some of the winter olympics!

Sounds like a dish the size of the face of Big Ben may be the only solution.

Thanks for the reply, keep up the good work!

 

[Gardian]

[quote user="Martin963"] gardian - suggest you try and do something similar,  that is to say that if the recommended 1 m dish doesn't do the business that you can upgrade to a 1.2 for just the cost-of-dish difference.   I'm not in any way casting aspersions on your installer,  he sounds as though he's got things under control,  but it would be a sensible protection against any future problems if the signal wobbles around,  as we know it does on 2F.
[/quote]

That's good advice Martin - thanks.

 

[mogs]

Panic over phew! After unplugging and leaving for 20 mins it's all working now, all channels. BTW we only have a small dish, not sure of the exact size but watch free sat/freeview.

[Quillan]

I have been following other forums and there seems to be a certain amount of BS floating around.

All BBC channels have moved away from Astra 1N. All of them are now on the same tight beam. The fact that you may be able to get BBC reception from another region to work where your default one does not is purely by luck and is a red herring. What is happening is all down to atmospheric conditions affecting different frequencies so you still have the underlying problem which will not go away unless you increase the size of your dish. BUT don't go out and buy a new dish now because the 'fix' is still a way a way as I know from experience. The bigger the dish the more it costs, in some cases and some parts of France going up to say a 150cm dish is big money (around 400 Euros plus new mounting and labour) thats a lot of money spent to get it wrong.

For the more technical (Martin etc) we upgraded from 140cm to 150cm today. The signal quality for BBC1 as of 11:30 went from 6.3db to 6.8db (measured at the LNB with the test equipment) and we are still getting pixels. There is no way I am going bigger than this what with a 180cm costing around a grand so I am now starting to look at alternatives.

[Martin963]

[quote user="soupagirl"]

Signal strength/ quality 90% / 85% respectively, best we usually can achieve, after yesterday's tweaking. In the southern half of Landes, between Mont de Marsan and  Dax.

[/quote]

Well indeed,  that does sound like the 2E signal is simply too low where you are to register on a 1 m dish,  what ever efforts you make.

Sit tight for a while until things settle down and we can be more certain what WOULD work at your location.   Frustrating for you and sorry I can't be more positive!   And of course you will - sadly - lost ITV and channel 4 next week by the look of things.

[Martin963]

[quote user="mogs"]Panic over phew! After unplugging and leaving for 20 mins it's all working now, all channels. BTW we only have a small dish, not sure of the exact size but watch free sat/freeview.[/quote]

Phew indeed!   If you were having problems in Gourdon I reckon we'd all have been pretty much doomed.

Glad you're back in service.

[Martin963]

@ Quillan

That's incredibly frustrating for you,  and I will readily admit to being surprised as I did think that a 1.5 m dish would do it for you.   Particularly as around Tarago a 1.9 m dish is reported as working,  and extrapolating north from there to you I'd have expected 1.5 m to be OK.   Granted that the edges of beams do tend to have unexpected lumps and bumps,  and clearly you're not favourably placed.

So your warning is timely for those in the extreme south of France to think carefully before committing to anything too expensive.    Like you I think that for most people 1.5 m is about as far as it's sensible to go.   I just hope that the installers are checking chez eux that whatever they're recommending works OK before recommending it to n'importe qui.....

Renewed condolences,   whilst I love to criticise the organisation I once worked for I'd still miss certain aspects of it - mainly radio,  which of course is the easy bit to receive via the internet....

[Martin963]

I'm not normally one to take rumours too seriously,  but here's an interesting possibility that is being discussed.

Eutelsat will almost certainly remove their craft from 28.5 deg E following their "losing" the fight with Astra/SES over their presence there.   And it's just possible that the resulting empty space (which is effectively a co-location with 28.2 deg E on most dishes) might be used by one of the Astra craft,  possibly of course 2E.

In which case it may be that it'll be possible to optimise reception of the BBC and ITV from 2E by pointing a dish slightly further east than at present.   Slightly is the operative word here,   and any advantage is unlikely to be seen by small dishes,  but by the time one gets to 1.5 m there's possibly something to be gained,  if indeed the scenario actually happens.

As it is there are reports that 2E is sitting at 28.35 deg E rather than 28.2 deg E - unfortunately my eyesight isn't quite good enough to verify that,  and anyway it's cloudy here in Devon!

As I say,   this is pure speculation at the moment but there are one or two pointers in SES's behaviour and public utterances that do actually lend a little credence to the idea.

We will see......   What do you think Jako?

[Quillan]

Interesting but where will that leave you with 2F i.e. what is its exact position. I understand that these satellites are basically in a line that can 14km long. Not much from down here I know but if one moves a tad and the other does not if you aim precisely at one won't you have problems receiving from the other?

Where I am coming from is interestingly on my Orange decoder all the channels have been swapped round so that the TF range i.e. channels 1, 2, 3 and 4 on the remote are now all HD. Of course if you use a SCART lead like be it makes no difference because the decoder 'downgrades' to SD for my TV. What if this happens with UK TV i.e. they swap BBC 1 SD with HD so on a Sky box for instance channel 101 is in HD because as I understand it HD comes from 2F and SD from 2E. Don't know if you understand what I mean?

[Chrissie]

Update from Mazamet - on our 90cm dish and Skybox.  Despite nice weather we lost all BBC channels sometime between about 11a.m. and 3 p.m.  And they have not come back.  Not even a stuttering picture.  Has something ELSE happened?

Chrissie (81)

[andyh4]

QUOTE Andyh4:

Northern Ardeche - opposite Valence.

60cm dish - no perceptible change, signal quality remains very high (no numerical number just an analogue representation of the signal strength/quality.)

Maybe the Arcachon Grenoble line is a bit far north.

UNQUOTE

Seems like there may have been some adjustments this evening as both set ups have shown a marked reduction in signal quality this evening. This was flagged when BBC2 started to pixilate - weather conditions are not abnormal. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

[AnOther]

I lost BBC1 & 2 this morning, BBC1 deteriorated as I watched but it was raining and this evening while it's not all channels are working normally.

I suspect all that's happened is that I've become more susceptible to interruption by rain where before I only used to suffer dropouts in really heavy downpours.

46 about 30k W of Cahors, standard zone 1 UK dish, noname quad LNB

One word for Q or anybody who has reached the limit on dish size - cable !

The right cable can halve the losses and be the equivalent of going up several dish sizes.

Not necessarily cheap but what price missing Eastenders [:P]

[Martin963]

[quote user="AnOther"]

One word for Q or anybody who has reached the limit on dish size - cable !

The right cable can halve the losses and be the equivalent of going up several dish sizes.

Not necessarily cheap but what price missing Eastenders [:P]

[/quote]

Very good point AnO. 

I suspected that the small Sky dishes would start to struggle where you are - at least chez toi the problem is very easily solved.

[andyh4]

This mornings signal has recovered its strength, but I think this demonstrates the need to hold fire for some time before going off and finding the wrong (or at least not optimal) solutions.

Like others I would like to thank our 2 experts for their input and support.

[Jako]

@Martin963: Moving the entire satellite to 28.5 just to tweak 1 beam seems unlikely. This would have an averse effect on the three other beams: pan-europe, middle-east and the KA band service (internet) for Germany.

[Martin963]

The theory behind the idea wasn't actually to tweak the UK spotbeam but (I think) to favour the Middle East beam in relation to other (possibly interfering) satellites on the Clarke belt.   Any change to the spot beam was a spin-off that might have meant that bigger dishes could be optimised on the eventual position.

But as you say - an idea that may well be simply fantasy.

[Martin963]

[quote user="Quillan"]

Interesting but where will that leave you with 2F i.e. what is its exact position. I understand that these satellites are basically in a line that can 14km long. Not much from down here I know but if one moves a tad and the other does not if you aim precisely at one won't you have problems receiving from the other?

[/quote]

Unfortunately I can't lay my paws on it,  but somewhere I've got the Astra/SES publicity technical film that they used to put up on ANALOGUE (remember them?) Astra 1 transponders which weren't in commercial use.   I seem to remember that each satellite was "confined" in an imaginary box in space measuring 100 kms x 100 kmx x 100 kms.   So I think they're slightly further apart than 14 kms but my memory may be faulty,  and in any case it makes precious little difference on the ground unless you have a GIGANTIC dish.   I think that probably we can discard the idea anyway,  but HAD 2E taken up a permanent position at 28.5 deg E then those people who wanted the BBC rather than Sky and who had big dishes MIGHT have benefited from optimising their azimuth on 28.5 deg E rather than 28.2 where the main cluster is.

Occasionally this 28.5/28.2 separation could be noticeable on a 60 cm dish in France,  some people near us wanted Horse and Country (which their elderly mother mistakenly thought was called House and Country,  in fact she pronounced it Hice and Country!) and on their dish there was a poorer signal from 28.5 deg E.   It was possible to move it a smidge eastwards to bring H&C in whilst not in any way degrading 28.2 deg E.

So yes Quillan,  on a very big dish there's a chance that one might degrade some services in an effort to bring in others as strongly as possible.    But if one didn't want the unwanted services (if you see what I mean) it might have been a thought.

As I say,  I probably shouldn't have mentioned it in the first place!!

[Martin963]

[quote user="Quillan"]

Where I am coming from is interestingly on my Orange decoder all the channels have been swapped round so that the TF range i.e. channels 1, 2, 3 and 4 on the remote are now all HD. Of course if you use a SCART lead like be it makes no difference because the decoder 'downgrades' to SD for my TV. What if this happens with UK TV i.e. they swap BBC 1 SD with HD so on a Sky box for instance channel 101 is in HD because as I understand it HD comes from 2F and SD from 2E. Don't know if you understand what I mean?

[/quote]

I believe that this is the eventual plan, both on freesat and Sky.   And presumably it will mean that if your HD signals are duff you won't see anything on 101 and will need to retune to XYZ to see the SD version.

Can't remember where I read about it so am open to correction - as always.

[Daft Doctor]

Hi, Firstly must add my thanks to Martin963 and Jako for their input to this thread, absolutely invaluable. 

We had heavy rain for a couple of hours yesterday evening and lost signal temporarily on one of our two feeds (input 1), the one bringing in BBC2HD, reading 0% strength and quality.  Input 2 showed strength of 80% and quality of 70%, so I was confused at such a huge difference, would that be explained by the recent changes?  When we lost signal last Saturday night during snow it was input 2 which went to 0%/0%, so don't think it is poor/loose connections on the roof.

As I was writing this, the same has just happened this morning (it's snowing).  Again we lost BBC2HD but can get BBC2SD no problem.  Now it is back to decent strength and quality again! Seems we are now very weather dependant on certain channels, unless there is some other problem I'm missing?  Will have to cope until the move to new house, but will definitely get an 80cm dish and a top LNB.  On that subject, are these Inverto Black Ultra universal significantly better, and do they need any different set up to a standard quad LNB?

[PaulT]

Obviously alignment is vital and I presume even more so when the signal is weak.

Would one of these be beneficial?

http://tinyurl.com/l9ua222

sorry, looks like it wil need to be cut and pasted.

I have a meter that is just a pointer on a scale. I had thought of sticking an Inverto Black Ultra on the 80cm dish just in case ir receives anything and having the box and a TV by the dish connected by a short piece of cable and adjusting to see if anything is received.

Then when nothing is replacing it with a larger dish which will obviously require aligning.

[Quillan]

[quote user="Daft Doctor"]

Hi, Firstly must add my thanks to Martin963 and Jako for their input to this thread, absolutely invaluable. 

We had heavy rain for a couple of hours yesterday evening and lost signal temporarily on one of our two feeds (input 1), the one bringing in BBC2HD, reading 0% strength and quality.  Input 2 showed strength of 80% and quality of 70%, so I was confused at such a huge difference, would that be explained by the recent changes?  When we lost signal last Saturday night during snow it was input 2 which went to 0%/0%, so don't think it is poor/loose connections on the roof.

As I was writing this, the same has just happened this morning (it's snowing).  Again we lost BBC2HD but can get BBC2SD no problem.  Now it is back to decent strength and quality again! Seems we are now very weather dependant on certain channels, unless there is some other problem I'm missing?  Will have to cope until the move to new house, but will definitely get an 80cm dish and a top LNB.  On that subject, are these Inverto Black Ultra universal significantly better, and do they need any different set up to a standard quad LNB?

[/quote]

It might have been Martin who suggested the Inverto months back for me to try and they are not that expensive (for a single anyway). I believe they have a higher gain for difficult areas. That said mine is not being used now (except for my French TV) because whilst it really pulled the signal in the quality was not as good as the one they fitted which had a lower gain. A lot of people use Inverto.

Inverto IDLB-SINL40-ULTRA-OPP Single LNB 40mm 0,2dB Black Ultra

Thats the one I have and it has 12 out of 12 five stars on Amazon plus it does well on other websites.

[AnOther]

You might want to read this before getting excited about a new LNB.

[url]http://www.satcritics.com/sc_tech_lnb.pdf[/url]

I realise it's 12 years old but the principals still apply.

Frankly if there is nothing overtly wrong with the LNB you have then changing it, even for oft praised all singing all dancing Inverto Black, is likely to disappoint.

Fastidious attention to dish alignment, cable length and quality, and quality of connectors, are all more likely result in improvements than changing the LNB.