satellite and aerial signal strength meters

[La Poste]

Greetings.

I have a few questions about satellite and freeview.

I have a freesat dish and also an aerial on the roof on a property and I want to make sure they are working OK.
I have connected up the freesat using a Goodmans free sat box that is not particularly reliable so I am ditching the Goodmans for a Humax FOXSAT-HD as I have read quite good reviews about it.

I want to change the satellite single LNB to a double or maybe quad so I can supply two rooms with two freesat supplies each.

I also have an aerial on the roof and seeing as it is already there I might as well make use of it and drop a cable down so that each room has freesat and also free view supplied, the aerial I will do at a later date.

The cable I want to use for the satellite is Philex PF100 retailing at £14.99 for 25 metres because it's the first one I saw on amazon.

I have a question, the satellite is already lined up but maybe it could do with tweaking and the aerial I am not sure of.
Are these cheap £10 satellite and also cheap £10 aerial signal strength meters any good or are they a waste of time and money?
I was thinking of maybe fine tuning the dish and also I am not really sure if the aerial is lined up so I am thinking of using an aerial signal meter to test it.

Reading all this what do you think?
Are wallplates best avoided with freesat and is it best to just leave the cable trailing through the wall?
And one more question, are universal LNB's really universal or do you have to be careful and buy the correct one for the dish?

It's a lot of questions I know so thanks for reading.

 

[Richard Burns]

Are these cheap £10 satellite and also cheap £10 aerial signal strength meters any good or are they a waste of time and money?
I was thinking of maybe fine tuning the dish and also I am not really sure if the aerial is lined up so I am thinking of using an aerial signal meter to test it.

Reading all this what do you think?
Are wallplates best avoided with freesat and is it best to just leave the cable trailing through the wall?

Not a major aerial installer but I do have one of the little signal strength meters for freeview and it does seems to work on indicating signal strength. I did realign one customers aerial and lost half their channels because there are some overlapping transmitter issues and I had to realign again! This was not shown by the meter!

I believe that reducing the number of joints in a signal cable will reduce the likelihood of signal degeneration so just feeding the cable through the box is the best bet.

Do not know about Universal LNBs.

 

[mhar]

Well, they have to be better than nothing!
Starting with terrestrial, if you are in a post switchover area signal strength is not so important, signal quality is. These meters will only indicate strength therefore you could end up in the situation (very rare when straight off air) when you have loads of no good noisy signal when all you need is a little bit of good signal. This type of meter will only tell you where the strongest signal is, not if it is the best signal.
Satellite, whilst you can destroy a signal with a crap LNB and not collect sufficient with a warped dish, in general you are only trying to get line of sight to the satellite so a meter like this will be ok but can be very frustrating as you have no idea which satellite you have the dish pointed at (there are quite a few high powered satellites close to the Astra 2 orbital slot). In the situation you outline when swapping a single LNB for a quad it won't be a problem as you know you are aimed at the correct satellite, any tweaking required is likely to be just because the two different LNB's could have slightly different focal points within the feedhorn.
Your cable sounds expensive. I pay £57 (+ VAT) for a 250m drum of pope ct100 equivalent. Modern LNB's have quite high outputs, post switchover terrestrial does not require high levels of signal so, if runs are short (my personal guide is 15m or less) you can get away with rg6 which is 1/3rd the price.
I hate wall sockets. They have their place when making provision for a tv point in the future but why would you wish to introduce an unecessary joint behind the main tv for example? Additionally if I hit the cable with the hammer when clipping or kink the cable it should be replaced so why when you have taken so much care would you want to bunch it up and kink it in a pattress box?
Don't assume you need to change the aerial. Without more expensive meters you will have to discover whether or not you need to by sucking it and seeing. There is no such thing as a 'digital' aerial. Don't assume just because you are splitting the signal that you need to amplify, it is frequently not necessary in post switchover areas - in the past 3 weeks I have installed two 8 point terrestrial distribution systems unamplified, one of which I only needed a basic aerial in the loft

 

[La Poste]

That is a great and very thorough answer.
Thanks a lot.

I think I will buy those brush cable entry point wall plates you know they look like letter boxes in the wall and leave plenty of spare cable inside.

 

[La Poste]

Well it looks like I will be christening my signal strength meter soon. My humax decoder works ok at my parents house but not at my flat. According to the signal meter inbuilt into the humax I have 80% signal strength and 79% signal quality but it can't find any channels. When I plug it into my parents sky dish it finds the channels straight away. Looks like I will Have do some reading on aligning satellite dishes. Does anyone have any advice?
on my Goodmans decoder in the flat I get some channels but not many and when I plug the humax decoder in I get no channels at all. So the dish picks up a signal but not all the channels. Perhaps the dish just needs small fine adjustments, I will have to buy a compass.

 

[mhar]

With your Humax at home try putting it into non freesat mode and doing a channel search. It sounds as though you are pointed at a satellite but which one? By doing a search you will hopefully come up with some identifiable channels and you can then go onto a site such as kingofsat.net to see which satellite you are on. From there you can work out / we can advise which which adjustments are required.
Which channels do you get with the Goodmans? If they are freesat channels from Astra 2 / Eurobird then tweaking should be all that is required.
I haven't used a compass in years, I go by the sun at 10 in the morning (at this time of year) - good excuse to only work when the weather is nice!

 

[timbobelfast]

If you are going to all the trouble, why not fit a multiswitch in the loft or somewhere handy.

You will need a quattro lnb for the dish tho.

Depending on the size of switch you get you can feed as many rooms as you like.

With two cables to each point you can bring down

Cable 1 - sat feed 1, digi TV and Digi radio

Cable 2 - sat feed 2.

 

[electricans_son]

I hate wall sockets. They have their place when making provision for a tv point in the future but why would you wish to introduce an unecessary joint behind the main tv for example? Additionally if I hit the cable with the hammer when clipping or kink the cable it should be replaced so why when you have taken so much care would you want to bunch it up and kink it in a pattress box?

Yes, when thinking of using an MK module "TWIN OUTLET TV/FM DIPLEXER":-


http://www.mkelectric.com/en-gb/Products/WD/edge/TVcoaxialoutlets/Pages/K5852.aspx


I was concerned that I would have to put two severe bends in the coax to connect to the module. Consequently, to avoid this and tidy up the exit of the coax from the wall, are there any plates (modular or normal) that just have a flex outlet in them to pass the coax through, or is the alternative to drill a hole in a blank plate for a grommet and pass the cable through the grommet? Better still, using a "MK Prestige Plus White 2 Gang Socket Mounting Frame":-


http://www.discount-electrical.co.uk/product.php/381773412/mk-prestige-plus-white-2-gang-socket-mounting-frame


Can I screw this into the lugs in the steel box in the wall and drill a hole for the grommet in the bottom of the frame so that there will be virtually no bend in the coax, or is this only suitable for securing to datacoms trunking? I assume that I will not be able to screw this frame into the lugs in the steel box;-


http://www.mkelectric.com/en-gb/Products/WD/BoxesandAncillaryProducts/boxes/mountingframes/Pages/K2133WHI.aspx


Any advice will be much appreciated, maybe other mounting frames that will be suitable.

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