Thinking of watching some of the football from
your tent with a cold beer? Want to know who is leading the race without
leaving your campsite? Toady has been in conference with Andrew Beck, chief scientific
advisor to the Beermountain team on communications.
Andrew say's: "With an
old dish (80cm) and decoder you will pick up one main channel - European
Eurosport with English audio, which has good race coverage. You can also pick up mostly Germany
channels, these all come from the Astra 1 cluster of satellites and are
free to air, so no subscription card is needed.
The hard part is setting it up - this is how I
recommend you do it -
- Get a menu up on the decoder.
- Tune the TV into the decoder.
-
Tune one of channels on the decoder into
a known free to air channel (Eurosport is good).
-
Clamp dish to a tent pole or dinning shelter
and guy rope it so it's very stable.
-
Work out where South is (see below)
-
Move the bottom of the tent pole a few inches
south (the dish mounting bracket elevation angle is set for the UK, being
further south in Le Mans the satellite is higher in the sky, so the tent
pole has to be off vertical, raising the angle of the dish).
-
The satellites are at 19.2 degrees East, so
you need to turn the dish eastwards.
-
Because the decoder is tuned into a known
receivable channel, you should start getting some picture when you are
close to the correct position.
-
You just need to fine tune the direction and
elevation to get a good picture, then guy rope the front of the satellite
dish to stop it turning.
Once you practice this a bit it should take no
more than about 15 minutes to get it positioned properly and secured!
Andrew is currently working on a digital set up
for the race this year in order to get better football coverage.
"This requires an upgrade to the LNB on the
front of the dish to pick up the weaker Sky Digital signal (the weaker
signal also means you cannot use the standard 40cm Sky mini dish in France).
It also makes positioning the dish harder, because
with the digital signal the picture does not slowly appear as you get close
to the correct position. It either appears when the position is correct or
disappears when the position is wrong. The trick is a more stable mounting
system as the old system has some movement in it (which was OK for
analog, but not for digital)."
(note Le Mans has a Latitude of 48.0 degrees North
and a Longitude of 0.2 East) this page gives you the elevation and Azimuth
(Angle East from North, Not magnetic north)
The easiest way to find true North/South for Le
Mans for that week is probably using the Sun.
At 13:00 local time the shadow from a vertical
pole will have an Azimuth of 0 degrees.
Note 10 minutes later it has moved by about 5
degrees.
(Data came from
http://aa.usno.navy.mil//l)
Thanks Andrew! If you don't think you
understand this, we suggest you find someone who has gone to the trouble of
sorting this one out and offer them a lot of beer to watch their TV instead.
We had a tiny dish on top of our home in 2003 and using a UK decoder it gave
sterling results. I would however caution you that you are there to watch
the race - we found ourselves tuned into UK Gold for Captain Scarlet on more
than one occasion! Let us know if you have any problems...
|
