Hi Forum,
I’m in Wellington, New Zealand and using INMARSAT’s Asia-Pacific feed. I received my kit on Friday (27/1/2017) and without too much trouble was able to get lock at SNR 6.2dB. This lasted through the night and had good downloads. About mid Saturday morning the SNR took a dive and stayed that way with no downloads/lock… it’s now 0.5 dB without the antenna being moved. Is there a problem with the Satellite or is something else going on?
Peter
Not the Satellite you are on - that seems to be doing fine. Could you recheck the connections etc?
I have discovered that a nearby LNA on a TV satellite dish is causing wideband noise that is desensitising the SDR and killing the reception, but only sometimes…
so , as well as checking the connections look for something like that ( and if possible turn off things like LCD TV’s and LED light bulbs, blah, blah ) & see if it comes good.
is that a standard Ku-band dvb-s2 kinda setup?
yes it is… with a “steerable” dish so it can look at any of the visible satellites
I had thought there was an issue with the Asia-Pacific satellite as well. I was bouncing around between 2 to 4 SNR on a sunny clear day down to the minuses to 2 on an overcast day with no packet download at all. I bought myself a 5m coaxial cable and with the LNA connected to the short antenna lead and the CHIP 5 metres away I am up to 4 to 5 SNR. The RSSI decreased from -108 with the original close coupled setup down to -115. Get rid of some noise and the signal appears, the CHIP must be a noisy little beast.
Giving that a go now, after trying several other things to no avail. I am not in the best of locations possibly as I’ve always found all sorts of noise right up into the mid VHF and the Hawkens Hill radar is also not far away.
Peter, ZL3TJ
Good luck with that. After several days of high SNR and 100% packet reception, my SNR has fallen and down to 98% reception but starting to creep up again.
Lorne ZL3LSD