The SES5 satellite I am talking about is a Ku band satellite located at 22 degree’s West orbital position. I have nailed this satellite before on the smallest commercially available satellite dish in Kenya, 65 cm dish. At that time it didn’t have anything that could interest me as the only two free to air channels available were Africa 24 and NTV, both of which were in french. The only French words I know were and still are bonjour and wii. Is gracias French, if so then I know three.
So with confidence I said that nailing SES5 was a piece of cake when a client came forward. Since I knew I could nail it on a 65cm dish, I advised the client to buy a 90cm dish and a Stargold lnb. According to my calculations I would take 30 minutes fixing the mount on the wall and 5 min or less setting the dish to the correct elevation and some 1 minute setting the LNB skew for maximum signal quality.
Goodies on SES5 satellite
At the moment according to lyngsat.com these are the available free to air TV stations.
Sikka TV
Afrique Media
Electron TV
Africa Home TV
Business 24 Africa
Vision 24
ImpacTV
I24 News francias
CCTV Francias
NHK world – the only English channel.
But that is not what the client wanted, he had moved from Burkina Faso and had this small Canalsat decoder that he was going to use to view football on some supersport channels. According to him it was much cheaper than Dstv because there was a choice of only paying for the sports channels. Canalsat package
The problem
After nailing Nilesat @ 7 west and Fox Movies was showing, it was time to lower the dish to almost vertical position and lock on 22 deg West. With confidence I lowered the dish and the setup could not lock on any transponder. After struggling for like an hour, I decided to install the dish at another location. Spent another hour there until I gave up.
This is the SES 4 West Africa beam which can be easily received using a 65cm dish even here in Kenya.
A trip to Dishpointer pointed the exact problem. I wish I could have used dish pointer even before I started the installation. It could have saved me alot of time and money too because I made another wasted trip there on a Sunday only to fail again.
On my next post I will point out the exact problem and how to avoid it. What do you think the problem was?
pole bro
It was a hard time but the experience I learnt wilk forever
Most likely it is azimuth. Nilesat is on 271.something and 22W is on 270 so a tilting of dish downwards alone will be off the target path and thus may not pick anything. Right?
Azmuth could be it, though that 270 to 271 gap seems too small, right?