Fine Tuning Tooway

1.  Your service provider can access graphs showing your uplink and downlink signal levels over last month, last week etc and can determine if your signals are good enough, and by implication if your pointing is acceptable. Your site can be compared with others nearby. Example Twoway signal graphs:

Ask if they think you need to do anything.  With an inexpensive signal meter is is possible to achieve excellent results, if you interpret the scale readings with skill. I would suggest degrading the signal either side to precisely equal degraded qualities and then setting the dish mechanically to half way between, both sideways and up and down. The polarisation is best set by calculation, starting from the nominal starting position.
I don't think you will see any benefit in speeds from correct dish pointing, during clear sky conditions, unless you are severely mispointed.  
The Ka band frequencies used by Tooway suffer attenuation from rain but the system has special link margin countermeasures which assure that the service survives light and moderate rain.  During rain your uplink power will increase and the forward error correcting code rate may change. In the downlink to you, the modulation method and coding may also alter to assure continuing service.
Poor dish pointing is likely to show up with the symptom "outages during light rain", due to lack of adequate clear sky link margins.

2. VPN involves all your packets having special outer headers added to route them to your private company LAN.  The content of the packets comprises an inner private destination address and your text etc.  All the content may be encrypted.  Encryption prevents the satellite modem and Skylogic hub from applying any acceleration processes so your VPN traffic does not really fit well into the satellite link.  I don't know why your VPN line fails - as a guess it may be due to excessively long packets which have to be split up en-route.  I suggest you talk to your company IP staff and ask if your VPN connection can be made suitable for a satellite link at your end.

3. I'm suprised that Skype works at all but there have been a few reports, like yours, of people getting some kind of service.  I believe that Skype has some automatic adaption process - whatever, it is important to use the low speech coding rate and pack several speech samples per packet to minimise stress on the satellite link.  The low tariffs on Tooway have traffic limits which you may meet rather quickly with streaming data flows like Skype and large file transfers. The table below shows typical useage quotas:

Your service reseller will tell you your specific limits.

Best regards, Eric.

It can take 20-30 minutes !

Left an old (reused) Gilat dish, right a Channel Master dish. Both are pointed at Eurobird 3a, signal level is the same.

I did an installation today (see picture, left dish), it took me less than 1 minutes to find Eurobird 3a and about 8 minutes to activate, the whole installation was done within 1 hour (incl. tea break) not a big help for you but it gives you an indication. Feedhorn, buc and lnb should all be in-line like Eric mentioned. It could take 30 minutes before the modem locks on the satellite.

I realy think you need a proper satellite finder to align the dish, thats all.

I will send you our MSN address by email so you can talk direct to me.