Quote from: juanbond on November 26, 2019, 04:47:28 AM

This weekend I installed my dish, spent a while failing to point it properly, and tonight finally succeeded getting a signal from the Galaxy 18 satellite feed! By far the hardest part for me was just getting the thing pointed properly to get my first signal in blocksat-rx-gui. Some helpful tips:

- I've read it's best to start with the elevation setting as it tends to be the more critical and finicky axis of alignment for such satellites. I made sure to get the j-mount pole as level as humanly possible so that the elevation gauge on the dish's mount would be of use. It helped to actually put the dish on the j-mount first, and then level. I initially tried leveling the mount by itself, but then mounting the dish to that ended up pulled things off-level a tiny bit. In hindsight, I suppose I could have also set the elevation using my level that has an adjustable angle dial, and computed the dish's proper elevation angle from it's specified offset angle. The dish mount's built-in gauge worked just fine for me (make sure to use the edge of the metal and not the nut on the bolt as your gauge indicator).

- For setting azimuth (left/right heading of the dish), I initially tried doing a rough alignment with my smartphone's compass, despite knowing it isn't super accurate and is prone to interference from all sorts of things. Surely a quality old-school compass would be better, though still affected by EM sources and magnetic materials... I'm a bit of an amateur astronomer, so I realized I could just use the stars and a good star charting app, assuming I had a clear night. I opened up my SkySafari app and looked for a bright star on or just east my target azimuth meridian. There wasn't a suitable star I could make out in my light-polluted Chicago skies, so I instead looked for a bright star further to the east of my target azimuth meridian and simply waited for good ol' Earth to rotate into alignment with it (about 30 minutes later). I then stood directly underneath my dish so that I could sight right down the LNB arm to aim the dish in the star's direction (azimuth-wise only, of course), and voila, my first signal in blocksat-rx-gui. Obviously if you have a roof-mount or little space below your dish, this technique may be difficult, but mine is mounted about 5 feet up on the side of my house, which made it super easy.

Thanks for reviving my old thread! I still have this setup...I've never put it up..as with many projects no time. I guess when the 'Zombie Apocalypse' happens I'll have to do this!

Anyway, maybe someday. Good to know someone is having fun with such. Let us know how the whole blockchain from space thing for Bitcoin works as well.

Too many projects, too little time. Sad

Brad