For this Onam, I decided to buy a dish tv India package. As usual I wanted to explore things without any help. Hence decided to install it myself, thinking I will get help from internet if needed. :)

Bought the STB (set top box), dish & viewing card (all this comes as a single package) and filled out the subscription application form.
Dish TV India Equipment
Wednesday was the installation day. Being a newbie to assembling dish, it took around 6 hrs to figure out where to attach different parts! Finally by noon everything was set for tracking satellite.

Now comes the azimuth & elevation stuff! Azimuth is the horizontal angle. Starting from North direction to South azimuth is 180 degree. Elevation is vertical angle to which dish must by pointed towards the sky.

The satellite to which we need to point was NSS6, where the dish tv DVB signals are coming from. NSS6 contains two DTH signals one of dish tv India (encrypted) and another of DD Direct +, one being a subscription service and other a free service. Thus by using single receiver, you could get both signals.

NSS6 is situated on 95 degree east orbit. Thus from our position, we have the azimuth of 119 degree and 63 degree elevation.

Day-1 : Wednesday (After Noon) : Trying to catch the satellite.
Being a newbie, it was a very stupid move to try tracking satellite. Even after 3-4hrs of pointing dish to different parts of the sky, I could not get any signal strength of more than 15%. (This is what you get even if you don’t have LNB connected to receiver. :-P )
Day 1 comes to end and I could not get any signals.

Day-2 : Requesting Help from staff
As one of the staff has similar system at home, I thought I would ask him and request help on installing the dish.

They tried to catch the satellite by pointing to known regions. In one instant we got the signals up to 74%, but the dish assembly was slightly messed up so that it would prevent us from decreasing elevation for fine tuning.

I re-assembled the dish and tried the same region again. But unfortunately even after 20-30minutes, there was no signal. Stopped doing further and decided to request expert help.

Day-3 : Expert installation
Dish tv guys came and changed the F connectors first. Then rotated the LNB about 90 degrees. Surprisingly in 15 minutes, they got signal with more than 75% strength. It was in the same direction we got signal first. Perhaps the LNB was the problem.

Couple of days later, I re-did whole stuff and I could get the signals very well. Now I’m confident to successfully position dish anywhere in India. :)

Lesson Learned: Don’t waste your time on things that you don’t know. Ask expert opinion first. Learn and try to replicate what they did.


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