Am I looking at the wrong satellite?

[frenchy]

I was whining on about having my dish stolen from the roof of my apartment to a friend,so to shut me up he gave me an old dish he had in the garage.Armed with this, plus his old Pace box and sat finder I decided to fix it up in my casita (sounds posh eh!) After a struggle putting it up (sat installers deserve every penny) I got a signal strength 9 and tried to tune in the box using all the tips on the site.But I keep getting the no signal message.It's pointing in the aprox direction of my neighbours dish,so in a very long winded way to ask a question,is there another satellite close to Sky's that I've locked on to?

[satandpcguy]

Hi and welcome,

Simple sat finders only tell you if you have a signal - thats ANY signal from ANY satellite.

You could be on any one of a number of satellites : 30 26 23 19 16 13 etc.... but the ones you are after are at 28.

"aprox direction" is no good - exact direction is required - as a few mm left or right on earth can mean a few 100kms off from the satellites 36000kms up in Space, and as you can see a few degrees off and you are picking up signals from other satellites instead.

And it also assumes that your neighbours dish is pointing towards the UK TV group of satellites also!

The only way to do it with a SKy box and a cheap meter is to set the sky box frequency to 12129 or 12207, and align to a siganl. If the date and time appear on the Sky box, then you have the correct satellite. If, after a minute or so, you have no date or time on screen, then move to the next satellite.