Unicable Motorised dish

[Johev]

Dear all,

I come here with a question regarding a motor for a unicable LNB. I will be buying unicable inverto black quad LNB. The setup means that one cable will go from the LNB to the motor and only then from the motor to the receiver.

Will any motor do as long as it«s disecq 1.2 or will I have to find a special unicable enabled one?

Many thanks.

[Rob van der Does]

For the motor the Unicable protocol makes no difference.
Make sure the motor supports 'Go To' (as most will do nowadays) so you can use USALS.

[Johev]

Thanks Rob,

I have ordered the Jaeger Moteck SG-2500A DiSEqC Motor which is DiSEqC 1.2/1.3 and states that has GoTo X, Goto 0 and USALS.

Do you think it will do the trick or do you have any feedback about this particular model / brand?

Many thanks.

[Rob van der Does]

I'm pretty sure you'll be fine.
But feel free to inform us when setup.

[Johev]

Help Rob, trying to configure the motorised dish but I am not bale to input any value in goto menu of the vix 29/9 image.

Any help please?

[Rob van der Does]

Hmm, just checked here: I can give in numbers in the GoTo line in positioner setup (ViX build 748).

BTW: why do you need that line? tbh: I never used it.
Have you configured the tuner to USALS?

[Johev]

We have configured the 0.8W to position the dish but when we select 0.8w in the channels the box is positioning the motor at 8 degrees.

We have also positioned it manually in the motor (using the buttons on it), we get good signal but after we change channel the receiver moves the motor to 8 degrees instead of staying at 0.8.

[Johev]

would you be willing to help me by phone? sorry but its complicated to explain easily. many thanks (let me know if that would be possible).

[Rob van der Does]

We have configured the 0.8W to position the dish but when we select 0.8w in the channels the box is positioning the motor at 8 degrees.
How do you know that?


We have also positioned it manually in the motor (using the buttons on it), we get good signal but after we change channel the receiver moves the motor to 8 degrees instead of staying at 0.8.
Well, that's intended behaviour. If the dish is indeed a few degrees out, you can correct your own position accordingly (still assuming you use USALS....).
If you have to move the dish westerly to get a good signal, you should move your own position easterly to compensate.
Do this in small steps: it's an iterative process.

[Johev]

The dish is 5 degrees West of, because we configured it manually like that. When we go to 30W it goes to 35W and gets very strong signal, when we ask it to go to 0.8E he goes to 4W and gets strong signal (due to the 5 degree deviation), but when we ask it to go to 23E the dish positions exactly at 23E and missed the satellite by the 5 degrees.

No clue what to do.

[Rob van der Does]

I now ask you for the third time if you use USALS?

[Johev]

Yes we use USALS, sorry and we updated to 5/10 version of vix

[davewhitaker]

Sounds like you may not have the correct long/latitude west/east entered into usals

After this I'd select a 0.8w channel let the dish align by itself then fine tune the mast pole west/east until you get a signal.

Make shore you mast pole is perfectly vertical. Then fine tune your dish angle.

Then check and fine tune everything again. Pole dish lmb

I presume when you put it all together you put the motor at the right angle for your latitude.

Then all you other sats should align automatically with usals

[Johev]

First thank you all for the help.

@Rob van der Does, sorry for the above request. After 18h of fine tuning and messing with everything we've finally given up. The strange thing is that we already installed 4 rotation satellite dishes in the past 4 months (solo2, vu duo (original), Xtrend 9200 and a gigablue), and all went fine, so we have some experience with this setup, but well today was not our day.

Components that we've used:
1) 80cm Aluminium dish
2) Inverto black unicable LNB (we only used the single cable output just for the configuration), we were going to use the unicable output as soon as everything would be working with the normal output but that never happened.
3) Vu+ Duo2 (opne vix 05/10 version), we've also tried a factory reset just to be sure it was not software (as much as we could, only using a different box would rule out 100% software bug)
4) Jaeger SG-2500A dish motor


We could get either 28,5E and 30W or 30w and 0,8W, we could never get all 3 dishes. After much thinking, we believe something is wrong with the motor. It moves correctly to 0.8W and 30W, but every time we choose 28.5E it is 5 to 7 degrees of. If we correct the change manually we get no signal in the other satellites.

No clue why. We have tried to reset the motor (put at 0 and use the reset button), it is by the way a SG-2500A Jaeger (ordered form Amazon.de), maybe something happened during the shipping, no clue.

We have it now setup on a fixed position and the dish is pointed at the 30w, and it is working (but I am not requesting the motor to move, as it would easily mess everything).

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

@davewhitaker

Thanks for the idea, but the long/latitude west/east is entered correctly. I went to dishpointer and got the precise coordinates aiming directly form the wall we mounted it on.

It moves to the right direction, but sometimes it just decides to move another 5 degrees more at some satellites, something we could not figure out.


Option 1:

The motor is not well.

Option 2:

VU+ Duo2 is sending confusing commands to the motor. Not sure how, but maybe something needs to be done.

Option 3:

The LNB has a problem, but so far at single cable output it is giving me 80% signal strength and its not even completely fine tuned (just manually aimed).

Option 4:

Something is wrong with the Aluminium 80 cm dish. Not sure what but its the last piece of the puzzle.

By the way the mounting tube is at a 90 degrees angel, we took great care to have it mounted properly.

I appreciate anyone help and ideas. Please keep them coming :)

[Rob van der Does]

Naah, don't give up.

1- What is your tuner configuration?
2- Is the pole to which the dish is connected 100% vertical?
3- How did you align the dish?

[Johev]

1- At present only 1 tuner out of the 4 is configured.
Configuration mode: simple
mode: positioner
longitude: 4.397 East
latitude: 50.833 North
tuning step size 0.360 degrees
memory positions 049
Horizontal turning speed 2.3
Vertical turning speed 1.7

I live in Brussels so this looks normal. Tried to keep it as simple as possible.

2- The pole is vertical, it is lined up with the bricks that form the house - we took extra care when mounting

3- How did we align? Well we first mount everything and try to find the 0.8W Satellite, fine tuning it so we get a reasonable reception, after that we can choose a different satellite (like the 23.5E). When it stops we fine tune it a bit more until we get a better reception, than we come back to the 0.8W and see if we still have a signal. If everything looks OK, we go to the 30W and see if we get a signal (fine tune if needed).

The problem that we did never got to solve was: when we choose 0.8w and we would check the scale on the motor, it would be exactly to 0.8W or maximum to 1W (which would still give us a signal), than we chose the 30W and the same happened (the scale on the motor would show precisely what we have asked), but when choosing the 28.5E it would pass the mark by 5 or more degrees. The motor would not stop, so we would see that it was moving east and before it stopped we would get a lock and than we would loose it because it would keep on turning for another 1 or 2 seconds.

No matter what we would did, one of them would not work. Adjusting manually the dish, or using the buttons on the bottom of the motor would work for the satellite that we were looking for, but after changing satellites it would get messed up again somehow.

What a mystery :)

PS: All screws are tight, so that it does not move from its position.

[Rob van der Does]

OK, so I have no idea what went wrong.

But there is a solution: don't use USALS, but store the position of all satellites. It's quite a lot of work, as you have to do that for all satellites, but then is must work.

[davewhitaker]

Is it just 28.2e that is doing this?
I had a problem like this on some satellites after updating my bouquets.
It turned out that within the satellite.xml file the positions had been entered in wrong.
ie 4.8w was 5w

If this is the case you need to remove it from the receiver and delete 28.2 satellite within your bouquets reboot the upload the edited version of satellite.xml .

Or if its just that one satellite but its correct you could just edit that one satellite within the .xml file and cheat a little
ie change 28.2 to 27.8 ect

Alignment to a wall for vertical is not very accurate. You need to use a spirit level ect

I had a friend who had a motor set up by a professional but was unable to use usals. The problem was that the professional had over tightened the clamp on the motor and had crushed the mast pole a little making the motor not vertical but the mast pole was vertical.


Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2

[Johev]

Is it just 28.2e that is doing this?
I had a problem like this on some satellites after updating my bouquets.
It turned out that within the satellite.xml file the positions had been entered in wrong.
ie 4.8w was 5w

Would this be possible on a newly flashed device, with no bouquets created? We were just using the positioner option in the device settings.


Alignment to a wall for vertical is not very accurate. You need to use a spirit level ect

I will check again today, but yesterday it looked pretty vertical to me :)


I had a friend who had a motor set up by a professional but was unable to use usals. The problem was that the professional had over tightened the clamp on the motor and had crushed the mast pole a little making the motor not vertical but the mast pole was vertical.

I hope this is not the case, nevertheless thanks for pointing out this possibility, this way I will be able to check one more thing.

@Rob

Could you please give me some pointers on how to do this? I tried to go to the goto menu and I was unable to edit the numbers there. I also tried to edit the saved position number with the remote and nothing. I am not very familiar with this configuration, so your help would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks for all the help.

[davewhitaker]

There will still be a satellite.xml file for usals to work correctly so it may be possible but unlikely, still worth checking.

If your mast isn't perfect you will loose west or east satellites it needs to be perfect.

You can use the positioner to find the satellite ie 28.2 then store it as position 1 then in your tuner config you need to set 28.2 as position 1.
Do this for every satellite you want with a different corresponding position number.
ie
28.2 = 1
0.8 = 2
30 = 3
ect

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[davewhitaker]

How do you know that 0.8w you are setting the dish up at is the right satellite if you don't have any bouquets to check if a FTA channel is clearing.

The marks on the motor will not match the real satellite positions.
Thor 0.8w will only be 0.8w from you if your location is at 0 degrease longitude.

For your location 0.8w thor will be a few more degrees west.
You could be setting the dish up to 4.8e that will be more like true south from your location, this could give you the 5 degree error.

And as said before the footprint for 28.2 has recently been charged are you shore you can still receive it with your size dish.

There are so many variables with a motor and dish its hard to help without being on location.



Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2

[Johev]

@Davewhitaker,

Many thanks for all your help.

1) I have checked with a digital spirit level and it was nearly perfect (98%, a -0.2). I will try to align it perfectly when I come home (I used my lunch break to test it).

2) We know that we were on the 0.8W as after we got a lock, we went to kingofstats, looked up a transponder with some free channels (configured it) and got a perfect image.

3) As for the error, we have accounted for that. When I say we got a perfect position, I mean the satellite degree+5 degrees west. The question was that when turning to 30W we got perfect 35W on the scale of the motor (good signal), when turning to 0.8W we got 5.8 or 6W still excellent signal strength (70-80% range), but when pointing as 28.2E we got exactly that, 28.2E which was 5 degrees of. We would see the lock, as the dish was moving, but because the motor would not stop at the right position we were hopelessly witnessing it moving for another 5 degrees (and sometimes even this was not a constant, as it also moved 7 or 8 degrees more), and got the 0 signal screen again.

During this week I am going to take my new box and test it at a friends place, and if it works I will have to test all the components somewhere else, to determine where the problem is.

I just secretly hoped that we did mess something with the configuration and that a simple tick in the openvix setup would make everything magically work :)


Is there a different way to configure the dish with the motor. The Jaeger SG-2500A supports Goto X and Goto 0, maybe there is an easier way. If yes, how does it work with our openvix flashed receivers?

[davewhitaker]

In the tuner config instead of having all satellites to use usals. You can set the individual satellites to use usals and have 28.2 only can use a pre stored position

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2

[Alec]

During this week I am going to take my new box and test it at a friends place, and if it works I will have to test all the components somewhere else, to determine where the problem is.

If you tune in the box with the Sat's at another place, and then if you have to give fixed positions it will be easier to do.

[davewhitaker]

Remember the positions will be stored into the motor and not the receiver.

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2

[Johev]

Thank you all for your help. This weekend the journey will continue and hopefully we can either get it working or find out exactly what is the problem :p

On another note, I got the 4 DVB-S2 version (2 Dual tuners) and I wanted to ask something about unicable setup.

As I only have one splitter, would this setup work?



I insert one cable in the each of the 2 dual tuners (leaving the bottom input entrances empty) and configure a loop through in the option of the box (is this even possible)?

Use the loop through cable from the bottom dual tuner to the other one. From what I read this will probably not work as in the dual tuner we don't have the signal out output as in a normal tuner.

The last one, I will have to go and buy another 2 splitters, so that I can have each tuner with a separate cable (original cable - dual splitter - 2 cables each with one extra splitter = 4 separate cables).


Any help will be greatly appreciated, many thanks to all. :cool:

[Rob van der Does]

ad 1: yes: the dual-tuners support a software loopthrough between the tuners on the same board (so between A&B and between C&D)
ad 2: indeed: the dual-tuners have no LNB-out
ad 3: possible, but a waist of money and a lot of unneeded cables, as option 1 will work.

[Johev]

ad 1: yes: the dual-tuners support a software loopthrough between the tuners on the same board (so between A&B and between C&D)
ad 2: indeed: the dual-tuners have no LNB-out
ad 3: possible, but a waist of money and a lot of unneeded cables, as option 1 will work.

Thank you Rob for all your help.

Well now I'm back with the report of how things actually went.

The good news is that everything was working perfectly and I did not have any faulty part (Dish, Motor, Unicable LNB or the Receiver).

We first tested my receiver at a friends house, with his motorised dish, and everything was working correctly. We than went back to my place, and used his Vu+ DUO (original) receiver to fine tune my setup. With his receiver my motor was turning normally and with the help of the Android application Vu+ Player, we were able to easily find the strongest signal for the majority of satellites. With the application you can monitor real time changes in the signal strength, which before was a bit more difficult (we used to have 1 guy shout signal strength numbers while the other one was trying to adjust the dish manually). After we got everything working we have changed his receiver to mine VU+ DUO2 and everything was working well. We were able to get 93% on 30W and +/-74% on the 0.8W, 19.2E, 23.5Em which was better than we have hoped for. We even got the 16E working for some free Bosnian channels (but the signal strength was 59-65%).

Now for the configuration.

The option USAL does not appear when you use a unicable setup so we've had to go advanced and configure each tuner separately for all the satellites. We've configured all the satellites from 30E to 30W, even though I only use some of them.

The internal loop through option did not work, as this is a motorised dish. We had to go advanced and select, cable connected to tuner A for B and cable connected to tuner C for D. Tuner A is the main one, so the motor only reacts to its commands. Important thing when configuring unicable is to assign a different frequency to each tuner. Tuner A got stream 1, tuner B stream 2, etc.

In the end we got it all working.

I have even tried the transcoding feature and I was extremely pleased with it. Even though if we were watching the same channel as we requested to transcode, the image on the TV would freeze and we would have to change the channel and go again to the channel to get it working, while the transcoded version of the stream was happily playing on the other device.

Now I only have 1 question, is it possible to password protect my Vu+ DUO2 for the remote streaming? If I introduce the IP address with the port number I get automatically displayed VU+ DUO2 page and I can stream/shut down or change any preference without the need of any authentication. Anyone else has the same concern?

Many thanks to all that helped me getting this working.

[Rob van der Does]

The option USAL does not appear when you use a unicable setup so we've had to go advanced and configure each tuner separately for all the satellites. We've configured all the satellites from 30E to 30W, even though I only use some of them.

Well, tbh: I always use 'advanced' so I don't even know what is/isn't possible in 'simple'.
Anyway: there's no need to set up satellites you never use.



The internal loop through option did not work, as this is a motorised dish. We had to go advanced and select, cable connected to tuner A for B and cable connected to tuner C for D.

This is not true: especially when using a motor you should use 'loopthrough'.
And Unicable or Universal makes no difference: B is looped through from A, C is looped through from A and D is looped through from C; an external splitter will be needed to connect a coax to both tuners A & C.

[Johev]

This is not true: especially when using a motor you should use 'loopthrough'.
And Unicable or Universal makes no difference: B is looped through from A, C is looped through from A and D is looped through from C; an external splitter will be needed to connect a coax to both tuners A & C.

Basically we are both right :) - In reality that is what I have, a loopthrough where I had to assign in the advanced menu of the tuner B that the feed was coming from tuner A. What I was saying was that the option internal loopthrough in the menu of the tuner B did not work. In practice I only have 2 cables connected in the back of my receiver ;), so no additional splitters were necessary, as you have told me in your previous posts and I thank you for all your helpful information.

[Rob van der Does]

....What I was saying was that the option internal loopthrough in the menu of the tuner B did not work. .....
Now you lost me.

[stav81244]

Sorry to butt in on your thread but i have noticed someone talking about the change on 28.2E? The last few days my signal strength has decreased from 85% to about 60% now. does anyone know why the signal would decrease? Also is there a way in adjusting the satelitte via the receiver which you have indicated in this thread? Help is appreciated.

[Rob van der Does]

Sorry to butt in on your thread but ....
So why do you do that then?
You hijack a thread with a completely different issue :rolleyes:
You're welcome to open a thread if you have an issue, or to join a thread about the same issue, but this is not the way and very impolite and inefficient.

[stav81244]

So why do you do that then?
You hijack a thread with a completely different issue :rolleyes:
You're welcome to open a thread if you have an issue, or to join a thread about the same issue, but this is not the way and very impolite and inefficient.

Thanks for the heads up and being so polite