Using a 1-meter dish with the Dreamcatcher

bigjohn2345 · 2018-10-17T00:30:14.878Z

I will start by saying that I bought the Dreamcatcher board only a week or two ago and am very happy with it. I first powered it on and discovered that the display wasn’t functional, but I could still configure it through the web interface. After being used in the sun for a few hours, the display mysteriously started working. After a few hours of sitting outside positioning the LNB and trying to keep it pointed at the satellite, I decided to have a go at using the 1-meter dish that I was sitting next to. It is an old Direcway dish that I originally intended to use for receiving the GOES-16 weather satellite. Even though the dish isn’t pointed very accurately (i unknowingly installed it on a small sinkhole), I get a (relatively) good SNR usually staying at around 8-9 dB from setting the elevation and using an iPhone compass to set the azimuth. A while back I remember reading a post where the beam type was changed which increased the data rates, and there was one type mentioned that would allow for roughly 1 Mbps if I remember correctly. I was wondering if it would be possible to achieve this or maybe even higher data rates with my current setup (and maybe pointing the dish properly). During this test, I remember that the receivability dropped off with higher data rates, and the roughly 1 Mbps was never attempted. Is anyone else using a dish with their setup? What kinds of data rates would be possible if using a dish versus just using the LNB?

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ac8dg · 2018-10-17T00:48:16.448Z

Your bitrate and packet rate is at the maximum. Since you are getting 100% decoding of the packets - you are achieving the best currently available.

bigjohn2345 · 2018-10-17T01:03:44.696Z

I was referring to a post a while ago about a “planned service disruption” where I assume the beam type from the satellite was changed which allowed for higher data rates, although it stopped being receivable after some changes. I’ll try to find the original post.

bigjohn2345 · 2018-10-17T01:05:03.961Z

Post: Planned service disruption: public/open experiment - June 26, 2018

I do wonder if this were done again sometime if it would be possible to get the higher data rates with a dish.