Putting Up a Big Dish!

My first satellite dish was a 10-foot C Band Dish which I purchased when I was only 18 years old. I remember getting it well as I was living in a 3 family house. My apartment was on the third floor. I remember asking my landlord if I could put a 10-foot tall satellite dish on top of her garage. She said sure but made me sign a waiver saying that the dish will not transmit any harmful rays that could harm people. (I signed it knowing full well this dish receives signals it was not a transmitting dish)

I loved that dish; I enjoyed scanning the skies with it to see what new things I could find. I got thousands of hours of use from that dish.

Many years when I moved out I took my dish with me and installed it at my fathers house on top of his shed. It stayed there for about two years and then in a storm a branch fell of a tree destroying that dish.

Since that time I have always wanted another big dish. For my birthday in May my wife gave me permission to get one. I couldn’t wait to get it!

Getting an old fashioned big dish in this day and age is a lot harder then it was back when I was 18. When I was 18 I opened the phone book and found satellite installers in the yellow pages and called them up and got a quote. When I got one with the specs and a price I liked I wrote a check and they came and installed it.

For this dish though I searched high and low for everything I wanted. I was actually going to get everything from one retailer, however that retailer had trouble getting me a 6-foot dish that I had ordered. Now this might sound like a bad thing but for me it was the best news possible as my wife (who’s birthday it is today!) would only let me buy a 6-foot dish, but after hearing the news she let me go ahead and buy a larger 8-foot dish.

So I got the larger dish from another supplier. Now the hard part of the ordeal was waiting for it all to get here. I would have had everything sooner, but was away for 2 weeks on vacation and I couldn’t wait to get home.

Last Monday the dish arrived and I couldn’t wait to put it together. I was planning on putting it where my 4-foot KU band dish was but I ran into a problem, the pole holding the dish was not the correct size for the new dish. I had to plant another pole in the ground.

I thought finding the pole for the satellite was going to be easy, but it was one of the hardest parts of the project. No plumbing supply shop in my area carried 3-inch outer diameter steel pipe anymore everything they carried was PVC. A PVC pipe would not hold the weight of the dish. So my father did a lot of driving and calling around and finally he was able to get a new 13-foot pole.

When I got home from work I went and got lots of bags of cement and a shovel. Within an hour and a half I had the pole in the ground and it was perfectly plumb on all sides.

I had to wait a few days for the concrete to dry, but then one day last week we got sent home from work early and it was nice out so I figured what the hell, and I put the dish together on the ground.

Putting the dish itself together did not take long at all. There were 6 panels which made up the dish, each panel had 5 screws that would connect them all together. To keep the center portion up in the air (and to keep the dish from losing its shape) I put a 5-gallon bucket in the center to hold it up.

This weekend my father and I got the dish up, and then I spent all weekend trying to get a signal. I was outside to 8:30PM on Saturday night trying to get signals… nothing. So before I went in the house for the night I snapped some pictures of what I was doing and put them on my website.

When I woke up in the morning I had a bunch of folks telling me where I made my mistake, I had attached the angle meter for the Dish on the wrong arm on the back of the dish. This was making my elevation settings off. Once I put the meter on the correct area on the dish and set the elevation I spun the dish on its pole. While swinging it I had a analog satellite finder and a SuperBuddy satellite meter hooked up to it. I kept on turning the dish until I heard a beep coming from the satellite finder. I did it I was on a satellite! I took a look at the SuperBuddy meter and couldn’t figure out what satellite I was on. So after going through all the regular satellites you could receive here in the US I then started going through satellites a little further east. Soon my screen lit up and told me I had a lock, I was on Intelsat 9C that is a satellite used to bring Sky Television into Brazil!

We decided to play with the arm that moves the dish and were easily able to also hit 55.5 degrees West that is Intelsat 805. The signals from these far away satellites were really good, I was amazed I was picking them up. We then played with the arm more to see if we could hit my true South satellite which is at 72 degrees (AMC 6) and the armed moved for a bit and the SuperBuddy meter lit up we were on the 72 degree bird!

I did the happy dance in the yard with my father and then tested a few more satellites that were to the West, and I am happy to report we were hitting them all!

After that I locked everything down and cleaned up as I had other things to do. I felt very proud that I installed my own big dish (with the help of my father of course! Thanks Dad!)

I got home at about 9PM last night and ran in the house and hooked the new dish up to my new AZBOX receiver. After getting it all hooked up I then moved the dish back to the 58 degree location and scanned in the satellite. There were all kinds of channels that I have never seen before! I stopped on a English feed of NHK from Japan and watched the news for a bit. Then went to 55.5 degrees and scanned in that satellite and found more cool things to watch. After that I needed to get to bed, as I had to be up for work at 6am.

It was a long weekend, but one that has me very happy with the results! I want to thank the folks from SatelliteAV who worked with me to get me the 8 foot dish and also the folks from Sadoun Satellite Sales who got me all the other parts I needed to make this a successful satellite project!

So now I sit here in my office waiting for the clock to say 5 so that I can go home and scan the skies. Although tonight after leaving work it’s a special night since it’s my wife’s birthday. Oh well scanning the skies can wait until later, some things are better then satellite TV… HAPPY BIRTHDAY HONEY!