Re: Rx_acq range

Trial and error is no good unless unless you can heat and cool the LNB over its full environment range (e.g. in a lab).

If 40k acquisition range means +/-20k then it might work fine when initially tested and then for several months, but fail in service during very cold winter or very hot summer.

It would be best to find out from iDirect officially if a 40k rx-acq range means +/-40 kHz or +/-20kHz.

You could try testing yourself by using say 40k acq range and repeatedly tuning the rx modem to all 5k increment frequencies over a range of say +/- 100k and record which frequencies work. You may be able to find a freq offset reading in the rx modem.  If so, record that as well. Try to do the tests quickly if the carrier is drifting while you do the tests.

Personally I would add at least 20k extra either side as safety margin for satellite conversion LO and doppler plus much more if your transmit modem and BUC 10MHz reference is not locked to an atomic reference clock (GPS or similar).  If you have extremely low symbol rate carriers you may have problems if there are several such carriers adjacent.

If the possibility of locking to the wrong carrier is not relevent in your situation then use a wider acq range.   It may take longer to lock, say .8 sec instead of .5 sec, but lock up time is irrelevent in an SCPC system that only locks several times per year - hopefully !

Best regards, Eric.