AnswerID: 137629 Submitted: Thursday, Nov 03, 2005 at 16:20
Member - Peter R (QLD)
replied:
Sky Pilot,
On trip to
Broome we landed at several spots where the ordinary TV antennae was useless.
Sometimes because there was no reception, or at best intermittent reception or only one channel was being beamed in .
Whilst at
Barn Hill station (the one on 60 minutes with the 2 bowling greens) we had very poor reception and it was around footie final time.
Spoke to a guy who had a satellite dish outside his van and he showed me the picture he was getting (PERFECTLY CLEAR), which turned out to be
St George versus??. He became my new best friend!!
He had purchased (along with 60 others from the park over previous couple of weeks) the whole unit from Johnny's Electronics at
Katherine and cost including postage was $565.
I bought mine on the way back at
Katherine, and got the dish +LNB unit, decoder box, remote control and cables + a 2 hour familarisation demo, together with a chart showing the satellite Location map throughout
Australia.
Basically you need to buy a compass to aim the satellite dish in the right direction.
Next step is to manually set (move by hand) the elevation depending what area you are in , and once green boxes replace red boxes you have picked up the signal.
The LNB attached to dish then needs to be twisted to point to a scale which increases the green boxes as high as possible.
When positioning the dish it is important not to have any trees or palm fronds etc in the way. I got 2 @ 10m with a joiner of cable so that I could move it to a suitable spot.
The cable is attached to the bottom of the LNB unit and plugs into the antennae connector on the van.
What I found was that in most parks others had dishes and were only too happy to assist in the set up.
No card is needed for the decoder box from Johnny's as the TV stations are all set. There was all ABC and SBS channels throughout Oz , Imparja 7 Central and WIN W.A. As well there were 100's of radio stations and we were able to pick up macca on a sunday when our normal radio gave us no reception at all during the day.
The beauty of having ABC or SBS throughout oz was that if I turned it on too late for one lot I could pick it up on say NT or WA later.
We retained our ordinary antennae for use in major areas where reception was no problem.
It was a good investment.
The chart with positions at this site (thanks Volante) will be of great assistance in setting up at various
places in the future.
Pedro
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