May 05 2007

Satellite TV Has Returned

Category: Kazakhstan,PersonalChrisM @ 12:33 pm

As you might remember, we recently had high winds, which blew our satellite dish on the roof off-target again. Luckily, our satellite guys came round this morning, and pointed it back at the Hotbird sats.
Rubber Smiley
I had previously asked Irina if we could maybe concrete the dish into position, as we’ve had these problems before. I found out this morning why that isn’t necessarily a good solution; the guys had just finished replacing a large dish that had been concreted into position. The reason? The dish had actually broken in the high winds – the stresses and strains placed upon it by the wind had no relief available by simply moving the dish, so the whole structure buckled down. Given the choice between buying a new dish after each heavy wind, and simply waiting for the guys to re-point it, I think we know the best solution.
The guys themselves are very friendly, and didn’t even charge us to sort it all out. One part I’m still confused over is the signal amplifier they connected inline with the co-ax cable. Any sort of electronic amplifier must, by definition, be active, not passive, but there is no PSU for this little adapter. I know you can have 12/13.8V DC on a sat co-ax, provided by the decoder, but I checked the menu settings, and the voltage appears to be off right now – 0 volts!
Whatever the reason for it working, I’m glad, the signal quality stats have improved, and one of the channels that previously wasn’t watchable, even when the dish was pointed correctly, now works 🙂 .

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