Looking to the heavens...

Happy Birthday to Claire, the wife of number one son, who's birthday it is today Thursday 11th November.

The new dish after I had dismounted it from the wall

You can see the stand arrangement which is really not strong enough.

This week has been dominated by trying to set up the big Satellite dish which we brought out from the UK.  We have always been able to get ITV C4 and C5 as well as many of the SKY channels although struggled with the +1 versions.  We could also get BBC News channel which is very handy as it gives access to the interactive things on BBC such as F1 racing etc.  However, I still think that the BBC produces the best drama and comedy programmes on TV and as such we thought that getting a larger dish would give us a better chance of being able to get BBC 1 to 4.  With this in mind we had the opportunity of a 2mt dish which was surplus to requirements from our good friends Allen and Jean.  It didn't have an LNB so I bought one which was matched to this dish off EBay for 75 quid whilst in the UK over the summer.  Our existing dish is only about 1mt but has performed quite well in the time we have been here in Greece.  The new dish took a day to put together correctly as misalignment of the panels would affect the performance.  I then had to wait a couple of days before I could mount the thing as we had quite stiff breezes and I didn't want to use it as an hang glider.  Anyway, it took another day to get it mounted and tuned into the Astra satellite; it can be quite tricky because you are aiming at something the size of a mini 33,000 miles away in space.  I was very disappointed because after several hours of tweaking I still couldn't get as good reception as I was getting with my other dish which is half the size.  In the end I have taken it down and mounted my old dish in a permanent location, I had it temporarily mounted on the balcony after moving house but now it's down in the garden in a nice sheltered location and getting better reception than ever, even getting some of the missing channels!  Moral to the story is that BIGGER isn't always better!  Anyone want to buy a big dish with an LNB?