Folks, This is something that's driving me crazy for quite a while, and I can't find out the answer anywhere. Perhaps an AfterDawn member can help me out. Here's the background. A Buddy has a 40 Foot Cabo Sportfisher (he bought it new about 4 years ago from a distributor near the manufacturer in California - there are none here in British Columbia). He had a SeaTel 1898S Satellite Shipboard TV Recieve Only System installed. It's a motorized 18 Dish Antenna in a dome on top of the Flying Bridge. I helped convinced him to go for it when he ordered the Boat, as he was spending big $$ anyway, and besides it came with a 30 inch Sharp LCD in the main salon and a 13 inch LCD in the Master bedroom. Anyway, the final fitting of the Boat was done as a Marina in Newport Beach California. At the time my Buddy didn't have his Satellite Provider purchased, but they used a Dish system (standard definition => not HD) for early commissioning. When my Buddy finally supplied them with a Bell HD PVR unit (He bought HD) they really didn't check it out much. The Boat spent it's first winter in southern California / Mexico without any TV (He cruised to Cabo San Lucas Mexico from Long Beach) before being transported via cargo ship to BC the following spring. I didn't get much involved as the "experts" were still in contact, and advising my friend, and I didn't want to seem pushy. Besides, I like to fish when I got on the Boat. That all changed when I spent a week of my vacation unexpectedly dockside in the rain at a remote northern BC Fishing Village (Masset in the Queen Charlotte Islands) in mid July 2006. My Buddy couldn't even get the TV to light up at all that year (before I got there), and as we were waiting for the Man Turbo deisel mechanics to fly in (It was warranty), I decided to try to figure out this mobile Satellite system. All I had was the SeaTel, Bell, Bose, Sharp, Manuals and they were (are) very limited. I'm an electrical type, but I've been into Cable and never mucked with Satellite before. I finally got the TV to work after a while, and learned about positioning the Boat away from other tall boats, the high Mountains in the inlets, and near the islands. (The Birds as so low on the Horizon up north you've got to look for an open southern exposure to get TV.) But the issue is it never got an HD signal no matter where you put the Boat. When we returned home my Buddy contacted the experts, who said you can only get the one "Standard Definition Bird" with this system. It was tracking ExpV91. So I left it for another year until we went fishing again. I'd been bugging my Buddy to move the Bell Reciever to his home for the "off season" which is really from late September until late June or the first week of July when he goes fishing / cruising again. He never listened until last fall. (He paid all year round for it!) He got his land base dish moved (He had one installed but in his haste to get the Reciever to the experts in California for the Boat, never used it => he never even had the Cables run into his house! He let a Tree grow infront of it in his garden.) and connected up by a Satellite service company. When they saw he had a picture on his TV (a Pioneer Elite Plasma which cost him a small fortune when new.) they figured it was done. So when I went over there some months later he said he wasn't all that impressed with HD, and preferred to watch his hockey games (we are Canadian!) on his regular cable on his Sony 29 inch CRT upstairs. I was dumbfounded as I have HD Cable at home and have a hard time watching standard TV at all => especially sports. So I decided to figure out what's up. I found out the reciever was still only seeing ExpV91 and somehow configured in a 4X3 screen size at 480P resolution. He had to "zoom it up" to fill the screen making everthing distorted and a bit grainy. After reading a lot of web pages, it was a relatively simple process to grab ExpV82 for the HD Channels, and set the system to 16 X 9 while pumping up the resolution. I finished up and left quite quickly before my Buddy had a chance to look at it. I bugged him over the next few weeks to see some sports and slowly he finaly started watching them in HD. Now he's a junkie! He says he can't watch Hockey any other way. He doesn't want to move the reciever back to the Boat. But now it's time to get the Boat ready so... I bought another simpler reciever (A single tuner Bell 6131 with no built in PVR.) Of couse it has the same issues with HDTV as did the 9200 PVR. I finally ignored the experts, and set up the SeaTel 1898S to track both Birds. Yesterday I manually pulled down the HD signals from ExpV82 along with the Guide Info by tracking to the "B" Satellite. (Exp91 is configured as the A & ExpV82 as the B on the SeaTel). So it finally had HD.!! Sorry about this being so windy. Here's the big question... I cannot figure out how to automatically get both birds seen by the reciever. Switching manually is slow (5 to 10 minutes) and far too complicated for most. There is an Auto Threshold for proper tracking of the Dish (you set a Bit to even to enable or Odd to disable) based on a 22 KHz signal being recieved by the antenna. But I don't know if the reciever puts out that signal or even if the reciever could stand to lose the signal stream while it switches. When I switch Birds manually I have to do a Check switch test then download the Guide Data so the reciever "knows" what channels it has. It then allows you to change channels on that Bird. But when you want to go to another channel on the other Bird, even if you manually switch the dish ( a couple seconds to lock on) the reciever has "forgotten" (erased?) the data from the first Bird. I've scanned SeaTel on the web and gotten nowhere. I've exceeded the knowledge base of my very Geeky Satellite friends, and anything on Bell TV I can find. So this is my last hope before I go and see how much it costs to get a "real" tech to look at this system. Before I do that do any of you have any ideas?
Folks, Just for the edification of those who read my first windy post, here's the update. I finally found a decent Tech at the SeaTel distributor here in Vancouver who told me I'd gotten all I could out of the 1898S Dish. He said it's obsolete (but it's only 4 years old!!), and there is no way for it to switch from one Bird to another quickly enough so the reciever doesn't go TILT without a Data stream. If I was willing to purchase a SeaTel Coastal 18 system (no there is no kit or parts swap I could do to modify the 1898S => I asked) for $6,000 (plus installation) it could do the job easily. It's built in GPS unit and superior processor allow it to know where it is pointed (say SAT A)and in real time know where the other Bird (SAT B) is so it can go directly to it without re-wrapping and searching for it from scratch. I told my Buddy and he's not prepared to go to a new Dish for $6K. ($8K if we wanted the 24 inch version for better reception ) So for now I'll write up the process and get it lamintated so folks on the Boat can manually switch Birds reliably when they want. I hope this Thread helps someone, sometime.
