LNB Help
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Satellite
Dishes come in two flavours, Off-Set or Prime Focus. An Off-Set dish normally
has the boom arm that holds the LNB, sticking out from the bottom of the dish,
and the Satellite signal bounces off the dish, into the LNB at a tangent. Prime
Focus dishes normally have the LNB mounted, pointing directly into the center
of the dish, invariably mounted on three tripod legs. We supply the Invacom
range of LNB's, which have been proven to work well in fringe areas, including
the Azahar region. Forget the Invacom single output version, as it gives no
more output, than cheaper alternatives. The Twin and Quad output LNB's, are
the ones to go for. $KY Digital+ & Humax Foxsat with PVR receivers require
a minimum of Two outputs. When working with 1.35M dishes only the Twin/Quad
version should be used, any spare outputs are left unconnected, alternatively
they can be used for addition receivers (or neighbor's can share a dish). Prime
Focus LNB's do not come with a Feed Horn, the Feed Horn is part of the Dish.
If your prime focus dish does not have a Feed Horn, we sell one that is designed
to be universal. Please be aware that non standard prime focus dishes, may require
additional fixings/drilling etc, to mount the Feed Horn.
Signal to
Noise ratings of LNB's (quoted in dB's), should be the way you can judge
if one LNB is better than another, generally speaking the lower the dB number
the better, unfortunately this is not the case. There are two ways manufacturers
can measure a LNB's noise rating. One way is to sweep the whole of the frequency
range of a LNB, and pick a frequency that yields the lowest Noise rating, and
publish that in the sales literature. The other way is to take an average reading
of the Signal to Noise rating, and publish that. The first one is not telling
lies, just one being less honest than the other. For example I have compared
an old Echostar 0.6dB LNB, against a 0.2dB Illusion LNB, on the same dish. The
Echostar LNB knocked spots off the Illusion.
About 5 years
ago, I went to the effort of setting up a "slightly too small" dish
outside my workshop, so I could do a side by side comparison of all the LNB's
I had available to me, these included the Sharp, Lidl, Illusion, MTI, Tecatel,
Invacoms, and a couple of others. I set the LNB's up with a proper BER meter,
then connected each LNB in turn to a PACE 2600C1 tuned to BBC1 NW. All except
the Invacoms gave pixelation on this channel.