Hello, my name is Dean Wagner. I have a similar story to most who post here - I'm a US Soldier in Iraq desperately trying to get some satellite service up and running for myself and 17 other joes. We've been struggling with our system for well over two months now, and we're all at our wits' end. We are obtaining service through Bentley Walker, and support has been slow and vague; to put it mildly. We're often waiting days on end for email responses, and when they finally do arrive they tend to bring more problems than solutions.
We started out with a Patriot dish and a LinkStar box which we were told to use with W6. We tried and tried, seeking help from anyone and everyone who knew the slightest bit about satellites here on base, but all the king's horses and all the king's men could not get that equipment connected to W6. We could connect to W3 with phenomenal signal, but BW said our equipment would not work with that satellite, and that we must connect to W6. Finally, we gave up and purchased an entire new system. This time we got a white plastic dish that I frequently see similar versions of posted on here and a Hughes HX50. We were able to hit W6 with this dish, but were then informed by BW that this setup must go through W3. Not a problem, we thought, since we were by this time weathered veterans in dish-pointing (thanks mostly to all the information we found within this website). We found W3 with little issue. We peaked-up our dish with our Horizon meter into the high nineties. We thought we were good to go.
That brings us to where we are now: Trying to get this Hx50 connected to the satellite. At first we got nothing from the box whatsoever. After a long era of emailings we learned that we must commission the box. After another exhausting exchange of emails we got the info we needed from BW to get this box going... Or so we thought. Since receiving our data, I have tried several means of inputting it. Some have seemed to work temporarily, some not at all. In the end, however, nothing we try will get us a green dot for our system status.
Before I get into what I've done, first I'll supply some background info. Click the images for larger versions.
The dish and such:
Our location and pointing data:
The info provided by BW:
BW Site ID ********
Serial Number ********
Please enter the following information into your HX50 using the following modem URL:
https://192.168.0.1/fs/registration/setup.html
Satellite Parameters
Satellite Longitude 7 Degrees East
Satellite Frequency 9985
Symbol Rate 6000000
LNB 22KHz Switch Off
DVB Mode DVB S2 ACM
Frequency Band KU/QPSK
Receive Pol Horizontal
Transmit Pol Vertical
OTA freq 0
VSAT Parameters
VSAT Long Degrees Site Specific
VSAT Longitude Minutes Site Specific
VSAT Long Hemisphere Site Specific
VSAT Lat Degrees Site Specific
VSAT Lat Minutes Site Specific
VSAT Lat Hemisphere Site Specific
LAN Parameters
LAN 1 IP address 10.136.40.241
LAN 1 Subnet 255.255.255.240
LAN 2 IP address 0.0.0.0
LAN 2 Subnet 0.0.0.0
Management Parameters
IP Gateway Address 192.168.12.100
SDL Control Channel 224.0.1.6
DVB Program Number 20500
DVB program Number DNCC 40000
VSAT Management Address 13.1.3.149
Default Gateway Address 0.0.0.0
VSAT Return Path Inroute
radio parameter Pure
Transmit Radio 2 WattOk, with all that known, here's what I've done: Obviously I've hooked up a computer and all that, DHCP is working, so I use the provided link above to view the "BentleyWalkerHX50 Setup" page.
From here I tried going to the "VSAT Manual Commissioning" link and filling out all the required data.
Here is where I first had a problem. Under the "Receive Radio Parameters" section near the bottom there is a dropdown menu for "Receive LNB Type". In the data sent by BW there is a "Radio Parameter" and it says "Pure", but on the LNB sticker (shown above in the dish pictures) it explicitly says "Invacom". Both of these are options within the "Receive LNB Type" dropdown,
so which do I select? I went with BW's recommendation and selected "Pure", despite my intuition to select "Invacom". Doing so puts a default value of "10750" in the "LO Freq (MHz)" textbox. There are two more textboxes, "Band Lower Edge (MHz)" and "Band Upper Edge (MHz)".
What do I put into these? I went with the freqs listed on the LNB sticker and entered "97500" and "10600" respectively. Now on the sticker they are written in GHz, so I had to change them over to MHz. I don't even know if I did that correctly.
The next problem was under the last section, "Transmit Radio Parameters". The sticker under the transmitter (pictured above in dish pictures) has even less information than the sticker on the LNB, and yet this section requires even more. I had no idea what to put here, so I simply selected the "2 watt" option and left everything else at their default values. One point of note is that the P/N does not appear within the "More Options" dropdown list. the P/N is 1500192-0123, and the closest values in the dropdown list are 1500192-111 and 1500192-222.
So, in this section, what data should I enter, if any, and where do I find it?Those two problems aside, I went ahead and submitted the form anyway. That brought me to the following page:
Where I click "close". Once the system has rebooted, I connect once again, and see the following results:
Here you will notice that on the "System Status" page there is no signal (13) and nothing is working. On the "System Info" page none of my settings were saved and everything is still set to the default values the box has had since day one.
Why aren't my settings being saved? Not the IP address, the freqs, nothing. Also, something else noteworthy is that the "Site ID" displayed on this page does not match the one sent by BW along with the data listed above, and I have seen no way to change it.
(continued below due to post-size constraints)