SatSig topic:

Mounting Pole, and questions

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Mar 18^th, 2008 at 8:16pm

Good afternoon Eric,

General questions, the mounting pole...if it is not plum, say it is leaning to the left or right by 3 to 5 degrees what would it interfere with? Couldn't you make corrections by adjusting your polarization? Could a tilt like that lower your RX strength by 3 or 4 dB? Also, I know everything in this great world is suppose to be grounded, I have seen these little dual shot grounding devices that usually are located on the mounting pole and you run your TX and RX cables in and out of them, and coming off this device is a grounding wire. What effect would it have on a VSAT system not using one of these besides being a lighting hazard? And the last question, I shortened my RX and TX cable by about 10 to 15 feet and saw that my RX level in the telnet command went from -38.0 to -34 is this a typical gain when shortening cables, or did I unknowingly cut out a bad piece of cable?

Thanks for all of your help, you are a great man for all of the help you provide.

Joseph

Mar 19^th, 2008 at 2:54am

If you were lucky enough for the lean to be exactly facing the satellite, an elevation adjustment could compensate.

In the real world a mast that is not plumb is not going to be correctable. The mast error, combined with the elevation adjustment changes your horizontal azimuth sweeps into somewhat diagonal sweeps. This makes it impossible to peak out the antenna to its maximum. It is not possible to minimize cross pole interference if the antenna is not peaked.

Plumbing the mast is your foundation of the installation. Invest more time in this step than any other.