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DIY INSTallation helping ‘le big society’ august 2011
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TEch project reader’s diy diary
diy installation
With experience and a little ingenuity, enthusiast John Zalewski has helped friends, family and the community to enjoy better TV LIKE MANY English speakers living in France, Anglophile American John Zalewski took up satellite TV so that he could watch British TV channels in Europe. As he recounted in his What’s Your Sat? exploits earlier this year (Wotsat issues 297-299), John has gone from absolute beginner to self-taught satellite handyman in a few years. His family are also members of their local sports club, and here we look in detail at how John first helped them to recover their satellite TV signals, and then helped a tennis club to improve their facilities for a special tournament for disabled players. John has also installed six sat systems for friends, two that are permanent and four that were (or are) temporary demo systems. ‘I finally put my non-penetrating mount to use a few weeks ago, for a demo for my next-door neighbours who are of Armenian origin. I suggested they might want to watch Armenian TV, which has four FTA channels on Hot Bird at 13°E. It took me about 30 minutes to set it 2 What Satellite & Digital TV August 2011
all up and they are delighted with it. ‘In spite of my offer of a free installation, my sister-in-law had a professional install a system so that she could receive UK TV at her home in Geneva, Switzerland. I was amazed that the TechniSat 45cm dish the installer used was pulling in a good signal so far from the satellite “sweet spot”. ‘I was also surprised that the installer connected her Fortec Star HD box to her HD TV using a Scart cable instead of a HDMI cable. So I plugged in a HDMI cable – no picture, no sound. I contacted Fortec Star customer support via e-mail, who got back to me in short order, saying that the HDMI output was turned off unless the Scart mode is in CVBS option. ‘Wouldn’t you know it – this was the only option I had not tried. Setting that option got the HDMI up and running with noticeable improvement of picture quality. But how unusual that HDMI output should be tied to analogue output options and that the professional who had sold her the box didn’t know this.’
This is an enthusiast’s account of work undertaken on a voluntary basis. The author is not a trained and accredited satellite TV installer, and while some of his tips may be useful, What Satellite & Digital TV accepts no responsibility for any action you may take as a result of following this article. It is well-known that the French attitude to health and safety is best summed up with a dismissive shrug. Some images in this feature are for illustration and were not supplied by the author.
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Project 1: The Sports Club
Pixellation like this is usually a sign of poor signal, LNB or cable damage
The club’s satellite TV suddenly stopped working so I had a look. First, I took their receiver, a Panasonic Sky box, home to check it out on my setup. It worked fine so I looked elsewhere. Note: Swapping a suspected faulty receiver to a working feed, or vice versa, is often the first step in any fault-finding investigation.
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A year later the system was acting up again with heavy pixellation on BBC One and Two. I first thought it was the LNB, so I replaced it but things didn’t improve. I tried my old FTA box in place of the club’s Sky box. It worked. A replacement Sky box was purchased and all was well. So all three main elements of the satellite receiving system had had to be replaced.
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John replaced cheap indoor-rated cable with outdoor-suitable co-ax
On the roof of the club I discovered three satellite dishes. Which one had been in use? Sighting along my compass, I found that only one was pointed at Astra 28.2°E. I followed its cable along the roof through a historic overlay of cable to find that the cable’s insulation had been burnt off by the sun. I bought a new spool of cable and some fresh F-connectors.
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Later the club subscribed to French sat TV on Astra 1. Usually installation is free with a subscription, but this didn’t happen. Months later, with money going out but no service coming in, I was up on the roof again. One of the remaining unused dishes had two LNBs, pointing at Hot Bird (13°E), and Astra 1 (19.2°E). The second was also pointing at Astra 1.
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A shaped staple or clip will not damage your cable
A few months later, the system was down again. I went up on the roof and discovered that, as the result of a poor contact between the co-ax centre conductor and the LNB, arcing had taken place and the LNB was burnt out. As it was a twin LNB, I snipped off a bit of the offending cable, refitted the F-connector and swapped the cable to the other output.
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As I was pulling up the cable leading to the caretaker’s flat, I found that one of the staples holding it down had pierced the cable. This was what caused the failure. I soon had a new cable going to the new receiver and that should have been the end of it. Note: If you’re going to use staples instead of clips, use shaped cable staples, not regular flat ones.
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TEch project reader’s diy diary
Project 2: Summer tennis tournament
A friend of mine organises the BNP Paribas Open de France international handicapped tennis tournament every June, near where we live. They’d always had a TV in the players’ tent so I suggested that they might enjoy watching Wimbledon tennis via satellite instead of their usual fare of the Tour de France, using my spare FTA receiver.
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A pole mount secured correctly
I subsequently made a non-penetrating mount out of an old tyre, a bag of cement, a 1-metre plastic, 2in diameter pipe, and some steel reinforcing rods for use in the following year’s tournament. This was to go on the flat roof of the building housing the changing rooms. Alas, this didn’t get used, as the next year the players’ tent was shifted about 100 yards away because the tournament was expanding. That year we couldn’t find a ladder to get me to the top of the mast that we’d attached to the tent. There was a forklift truck that had been in use to set up the tents and haul materiel, so I got someone to drive it over to the mast. Standing on a pallet with my gear I was raised to the desired level, praying that the driver knew what he was doing and wouldn’t tip the forks down and send me flying. Note: This could easily be the introduction to a Darwin Award nomination. Fortunately it wasn’t. Do not try this at home, or anywhere else.
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We jammed a 16ft x 2in steel pipe into the ground and lashed it to a loudspeaker mount on the side of a building. I was terrified that the cord would break and it would all come crashing down on a bystander’s head. It didn’t. Note: Any pole mount should be either securely concreted into the ground or bracketed to the supporting wall.
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Use an inclinometer to check the view before installing the dish
Last summer was the fourth year I set up the satellite gear for the tournament. We had a total of two dishes, picking up three different satellites and feeding three satellite receivers for an HD 32in flat screen TV, a 103in Panasonic TV (that’s an 8ft 7in diagonal!) and a giant screen, measuring 4m x 3m, mounted on one side of centre court. The main problem with this installation was trees – they were tall and they were everywhere. The tournament director didn’t want the sat dishes to be visually intrusive. Centre court in this tournament is oriented roughly east-west. It was agreed that I could install dishes on top of the fence at the north-west corner of the court. This gave a line of sight to Astra 28.2°E that cut diagonally across the court with sufficient distance from those pesky trees. I suggested that spray painting the dishes green would make them even less visible.
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I put a new 60cm dish on the pipe and lined it up through a gap in the trees, except that the gap wasn’t big enough and there was occasional pixellation. The mast fitting of this new dish had teeth instead of a smooth ‘vee’, which caused the dish to wobble as it was rotated on the mast to scan for the satellite and again as the bolts were tightened.
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I had been planning to secure a long steel pole to the corner brace of the fence using ratchet cargo straps but the tournament’s electrical contractor offered to strap it in place with stainless steel bands. The pole was ideal for a dish pointed at Atlantic Bird 3 (5°W), and a second one pointed at Astra 2 (28.2°E ) with second LNB for Astra 1 (19.2°E).
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Disaster struck when I connected the Freesat HD box to the 103in, 1920 x 1080 HD screen. After about two minutes of being OK, the picture would suddenly collapse into a snowstorm. Turning the box off then on again would restore the picture for another two minutes or so. The Freesat box was showing excellent satellite signal strength, so it wasn’t that. I tried reducing the resolution of the box’s output to 720p; the problem persisted. Finally, when I reduced it to 576p, the picture was stable. I breathed a sigh of relief; I was probably the only one who would notice the difference. I wondered if there was some incompatibility between the box and the screen, possibly related to the fact that an HDMI-to-DVI adapter was required to connect an HDMI cable to the screen. I disconnected the box and tried it out with the 32in HD TV – same problem; the box was definitely at fault. After the tournament I took it back to the UK, where the retailer cheerfully replaced it under guarantee.
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The three LNBs were hooked via a DiSEqC switch to my old FTA receiver, for the giant screen at low resolution – about 400 x 300 pixels. The Astra 2 LNB pointing was a Faval quad used to feed three screens: the giant screen; a Freesat HD box connected to the 103in screen; and a standard-definition FTA box connected to the 32in screen in the VIP bar.
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When the tournament ended and we took everything down, we decided to leave the two satellite dishes in place for next year. They stick out like ‘green’ sore thumbs now that the leaves have gone brown. On the other hand, it will save a lot of work if the metal bands survive a year exposed to the elements. Note: A lot depends on wind loads, weather, and the strength and quality of the metal bands, of which only three are shown. Galvanised bands can survive years of exposure to the elements, but the load should be distributed through several points, and the maximum expected loads, based on typical wind speeds and the antenna size, should preferably be calculated in advance.
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The VIP area was located across the long side of the tennis court from the dishes. I had tried mounting a separate dish on a high fence closer by, to have a viably short cable run, but the dish was still in tree shadow. I had read that 30m of cable was the maximum recommended run, but with 60m we still had a great image that didn’t pixellate at all.
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