My dishfarm in western Maine, as of yesterday



At left, a 6' C-band dish mounted on a tree trunk. Not being used right now.
To the right of that, a Fortec 90CM on SG2100 motor.
To the right of that, a 10' Orbitron on an Atlas H-H.
In front of that, my Primestar, mounted on a log.  Fixed, aimed at AMC21 for PBS.
To the right of the Primestar, under the umbrella, you can see tripod setup where the new home of the Primestar will be.

Below, side view of the Primestar.  


Above, Log, wedged between 2 rocks, 4x4 screwed to log, and PVC pipe screwed to 4x4. 
Primestar on PVC pipe, which is bending .  Whole thing moves around a lot in wind.

Below, a picture of the view of both the Primestar and BUD.



Primestar view is partially blocked by the maple trees above the garage, a bit to the left of the Wild Blue antenna and weather station on top right of garage.  C-band view is a bit higher and right of that, partially blocked by nearer oak tree.

I decided to move the Primestar dish, since AMC-21 reception will only get worse there as tree grows, and the log mount isn't stable.  I found a spot about 20' to the east of it's current position where the view was better, ie where the tripod was in first picture.

Below, a view of the tripod with digital level mounted on it.

Note level reading 16 deg, the approximate elevation of AMC21.
Below the view, looking over the level in the direction of AMC21.

AMC-21 is just to the left of the maple tree that
is just at the upper right corner of the level.

Dug hole. Put pipe in concrete, then tried to move the Primestar over to the new pole, and found out the mistake I had made. 
Turns out that I bought the wrong sized pipe.  The metal pipe I bought was slightly smaller than the PVC pipe it was mounted on before, and I assumed that the Primestar mount, could tighten enough to attach securely, but it was too small, and couldn't be tightened on the metal pipe.   :-(  

At this point, I got the bright idea of cutting a 1/8th" slot out of a section of the PVC pipe, and bending it open enough to slip around the pipe.  This wasn't easy, but I got it on. See below:

This "looked" like it would work, however, NOW, it was too BIG to fit in the Primestar mount.  !#@$#%$^%*  Fooey.

After quite a bit of thought, I cut the PVC pipe into thirds, like below:


At first I tried using two of these 1/3rd sections, but it was STILL too big.  So finally, I just put in ONE of these PVC sections, and that allowed the mount to fit over the pipe, and now the mount could be tightened on the pipe.   :-) 

Below, front view of the new setup.

Below, east side view of the setup.

Below, a closeup of the west side of mount, showing
the PVC spacer used to adapt it to the small pole.


New setup seems to work pretty well.  I even get the Lousianna PBS DVB-S2 transponder, which I only got occasionally before.   This should get me reliable PBS for a couple more years until that maple tree expands to the left.   :-)