Re: [amsat-bb] Primestar dish from the trash

["Mark L. Hammond" <hammond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Every so often, we have "bulky item" trash pickup here in town.
>I figured *somebody* must be throwing out a Primestar dish.
>After an hour of driving around, I finally found one (one man's trash is 
>another man's treasure).

:-)

>It still has the house mounting brackets on it, so I can't tell, as yet, 
>how heavy the dish itself is.

Yeah, I haven't done this test either.  The brackets seem "beefy" enough to 
add lots of weight.

>I've seen on this list that other folks have tie-wrapped a TranSystem d/c 
>to the feedpoint of these dishes.

Yep, I've done this too (after being given a nice description by Jim K6CCC).

>What I'm wondering is, will this thing be too heavy / have too much 
>windload to be used with the Yaesu 5400 rotor?

Boy, I don't think I'd put the Primestar dish on my G-5500.  Seems to heavy 
and not a very good center of gravity, but again--like you I haven't taken 
the heavy brackets off.

>Also, will the Primestar have more gain than the Myers BBQ ("~24 dB") that 
>I'm now using?

Well, I bet it's close.  Perhaps the Primestar could be 3 dB better since 
you can use a helix feed for circular polarization.  I hope to experiment 
with this soon, but not sure I can put any real numbers on things.

>Even if I can't rotor-mount it, It was still too cool a thing to pass up.

Yep, I got mine for free, too.  It's fun to play with, and to me, that's 
most of the fun of satellite radio!

>Bill Howell

73,

Mark L. Hammond  [N8MH]

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