QO100 DATV attempt
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…
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