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Done, bar the media center installation…

Safety first, I set up the area where the ladder was to go on Thursday evening. The main component of this was piece wood screwed into the pathway for the foot of the ladder to butt against.

I put the dish up on Friday evening, since the weather was nice.

Saturday defied the weather forecast and I was able to wire up the dish.

Alignment was remarkably swift and simple. As mentioned in my previous posts here and here, I’d read and re-read relevant sections of Martin Pickering e-book on numerous rainy evenings as well as this post on The Perfect Satellite Dish Alignment - a How To Guide, but I was still surprised.

Having used Dish Pointer to find my Azimuth and Elevation, I pointed the dish in roughly the right direction. I could hear the Olympics blaring from the tv attached to the old digibox, so I knew I’d locked on to the right satellite straight away. Then it was just a couple of horizontal adjustments to get the strongest tone on the satellite finder. I did a sanity check on the vertical and got a bit of an improvement there and finished off with the skew adjustment. I don’t think it could have taken much more than five minutes in total.

After that it was just a case of tidying up. Fitting the f-plugs on the dual shot gun cable and sealing the hole into the loft space.

Part of the installation aim was to replace a failing freeview box in the kitchen, so I browsed around for a SD freesat tuner to fill it’s space. I chose the bush, mainly as it was the cheapest and I could pick one up locally.

I came across Join Freesat web site in the course of all this, which was a quite interesting resource.

Bought, plugged in and tuned without any issues. WAF achieved so far at least; she felt the receiver looked better than the previous box and the picture seemed better too.

Being the impatient sort, I ordered my BlackGold BGT3540 6in1 DVB-S tuner, even though I haven’t yet installed my satellite system. (Though I have convinced myself that it will work!)

However, I didn’t expect it to turn up the next day. This was quite frustrating since the lack of suitable weather and someone to hold the ladder for me meant there was no way it was going to happen this weekend.

Spurred on though, I spent a couple of hours crawling around the loft routing the cable in readiness. The wind and rain were lashing the other side of the slates, so I was thankful to at least have an indoor task to complete.

My cunning plan to achieve the WAF and keep the cables safe and out of site, I routed them down the cavity surrounding the soil stack running the full height of the house; from vent in the roof to the drains beneath. A little fiddly, but I think worth the effort. My living room set up is in the corner of the room backing on to this space and the stack itself is boxed in the kitchen. Thus allowing my shotgun cable to be ready for the BlackGold in my (recently updated) media center and a third cable for a tuner in the kitchen.

Now as soon as it stops raining, I’ll get up that ladder!

Last week, I received a bunch of stuff I had ordered from SatCure. Cable, F-Plugs, silicon paste, that sort of thing. They provide a easy to use shopping list grouping the usual stuff together, rather than you having to trawl the site looking for what you’re after.

Yesterday though, my region 2 dish with quad LNB arrived. It was pretty straight forward to assemble. No instructions came with it, but they can be downloaded from here.

I wanted to have a play with my kit, but it was a work night, there was only an hour of light left and I was not really in a position or the mind set to embark on the full installation. I set the dish up on a camera tripod and pointed it in the general direction of the astra cluster.

Previously I had spent some time looking at Dish alignment with Dishpointer to get my compass bearing and elevation. This is a great resource if you’re planning an installation. Before looking at this, my assumed best location for my dish was way off. Completely the wrong side of our house!

I hooked up a satellite finder and an old sky digibox that hadn’t been used for five or more years. I didn’t really expect much of the box, but figured that it would at least power the satellite finder. Sure enough, even on my dish and tripod test rig, it was reasonably easy to fine tune the position.

Again fore reading resources such as Martin Pickering’s eBook and these sites helped:

• http://www.satcure.co.uk/tech/satmeter.htm
• http://www.uksatellitehelp.co.uk/
• http://www.heyrick.co.uk/ricksworld/digibox/satfinder.html

The digibox didn’t lock at first. This would usually suggest that I was pointing at the wrong satellite, but I was more confident with the orientation than I was with the state of the box. Being a a software engineer faced with a hardware problem, I went through a couple of power down cycles; sure enough a few minutes later I had a lock, 50% signal strength (with meter still in-line) and 75% quality. A pretty pleasing result for no more than an hour of tinkering, and that’s an hour from unwrapping, and getting all the kit together. Lining up took no more than a few minutes.

This has definitely given me the confidence to proceed with the installation proper.