Unicable Motorised 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.


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[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.



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[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

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[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.

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[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

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?

1. 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)?
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.

[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.