Well this got off to a bad start! Ahead of my plan to move the QO100 disk so I can get the electronics in the loft rather than the garage I wanted to test out the Winterhill box to see if I could pick up any DATV on the wideband transponder.
The Winterhill box generates the 18V necessary for the LNB so in theory it was just a matter of pulling the coax feed from the bias-tee in the garage and putting that into the Winterhill. That done, I could see the occasional signal but never a picture.
Now, I had noticed that the NB beacon strength had dropped a while ago so today I decided to adjust the dish in case it had been knocked. That snowballed! I needed a laptop so I could see the signal strength while at the dish (remember the dish is on the garage wall currently at about 6 foot, so easy reach). Of my two laptops one is a Mac and had no SDR software, the other a Samsung Netbook running Ubuntu and terribly slow. I tried setting up several SDR packages on the Netbook and failed miserably. At this stage I need to state that after a lifetime working in IT and solving problems I now have no time or patience to solve my own, so if something fails it goes to the bin!
So, the Mac. CubicSDR refused to even think about installing. I found SdrDX which works with the USB Funcube dongle amongst other, mainly networked things. This worked just fine.
Mac out on a lab stool in the shade, SdrDX and the Funcube running, the bias-tee in the garage powered up, a cable fed out the garage back to the dish and into the Funcube… fortunately it didn’t all fall over and actually worked. So I adjusted the dish but only gained a couple of dBm more than before no matter what I tried. Oh well…
Back inside and plug the Winterhill in. Back upstairs to the Windows PC and now I see locked signals but just not enough signal strength for a picture.
I wonder if the LNB is full of spiders…
Anyway, now the QO100 kit in the garage is in bits I can’t transmit so it can all stay as it is. My next plan is to remove the POTY and install an LNB and see if that gets me any DATV pictures, otherwise I am a bit stuck. The 1.2M offset dish has a clear view of the sky and should be ideal – it worked just fine for SSB on the NB transponder. I never got round to sorting out a GPSDO input for the Pluto but I am about to get a SG Labs 3cm transverter and plan to use an actual transceiver for tx once the dish is moved.