posted
I suppose I may have too much time on my hands here, but I got to wondering what search pattern the controller uses when it's peaking on a satellite.
'In a previous life' (ie, when I didn't have as much time on my hands...), I worked with a military satellite-radio that would perform its search in a very specific figure-8 pattern that looked in each adjoining cell of an octagon-shaped grid matrix before moving on to the next group. The pattern was pre-preprogrammed from its software, so there was no way to override it nor to 'coax' it in any way to see if it did in fact achieve its best signal. Watching the dish do its thing was obvious as it'd pick a cell, listen for the signal, and then either go to the next cell or break that cell into a smaller cell-group and search it til it found the strongest signal peak.
Now, with DonB's excellent D-3 Administrator program (I never use the Motosat's version, too slow and cumbersome), we have full control over when and how to point the dish in large or very tiny increments.
So I got to wondering what it's actually doing when it searches, and how it does it, and if I can emulate it. I tried watching the dish, and also trying to jot down the little numbers as they change on the screen, but can't seem to discover a pattern. I even started thinking about having a race, ME vs D3. More realistically, however, it may help sometime if I was having trouble acquiring the signal automatically and wanted to take over manually and peak the signal.
quote:More realistically, however, it may help sometime if I was having trouble acquiring the signal automatically and wanted to take over manually and peak the signal.
Really can't help you on how it searches.
I use my BOW along with Signal Strength from my DirecTV receiver for the times it passes right by the Internet satellite.
It doesn't happen often. But saves a lot of time to hit the stop when it does. And then back dish up to a signal manually.
-------------------- Larry 99 34Q Discovery & 08 HHR LT2 Banks Powerpack F1 | D3 3.8.9 | HN7000S | 117/1070 |Hardwired through 8 Port Switch with WRT54 |Trav'ler Slimline SWM |Wilson SOHO Click here to see where I am Posts: 1157 | From: Homestead, FL | Registered: Aug 2003
| IP: Logged |
Have you tried David Smith's utility to monitor signal strength, called DW6KSS? (It's in the Articles Section). It's a graphical representation on your pc screen of SS as the dish searches thru the sky and finds (or all too often 'passes') the bird. I've found it to be a superb tool.
posted
When the Datastorm as located the correct satellite the peaking routine is done with signal strength (not quality) and it searches to each edge of the azimuth until it finds the best strength. It then peaks the elevation the same way. If you watch the System Status line you will see it reading Peaking Azimuth and then Peaking Elevation and then Search Operation Complete. If you are trying to do it manually (there would be no reason to do this unless something is not working properly or you are simply bored) you would perform a similar operation to get the best SQ. You would not want to adjust the skew settings unless you have the ACP operation running in Manual mode so you could see how these movements are effecting your cross-pol results.
-------------------- Bill Adams Winegard Company Posts: 15703 | From: Traveling the Western US | Registered: May 2003
| IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic
