As you discovered, though, you will still get on more quickly, on average, if you park such that the bird is a few degrees from the starting point of the azimuth swing, rather than a few degrees from the end point of the swing.

I disagree with the advice about manual aiming. While someone who is well practiced at it, myself included, can usually acquire a signal as quickly or, frequently, more quickly than the automatic search, if you are regularly much faster at it, then there is something wrong with the calibration of the mount; the real solution to that is to fix the calibration.

For our D2 based system, we usually hit the signal within 15-20 seconds from start of search, where by “start of search” I mean elevation and skew already set and azimuth position at the beginning of the window. The vast majority of the time spent getting on line is spent elevating, skewing, and rotating the mount, and “peaking” the signal, two activities that take the same amount of time no matter how the signal is first acquired.

Admittedly, my system uses a compass, so it starts the azimuth sweep just 20° ahead of the bird, whereas a system without compass might sweep an average of 180° if no attention is paid to parking direction. But the difference in time it takes to cover that extra 160° sweeping, versus just rotating that far directly, amounts to perhaps half a minute or so.

So, Mark, if you were still on the road I would suggest re-calibrating the mount and fine-tuning the window size to speed up acquisition time.

I spend the time while the mount is doing its thing taking care of other tasks anyway — there’s usually at least four or five minutes of other site set-up to be done. Of course, I have a dog to walk…

-Sean

Just get out a compass and find the general direction of your satellite… it changes as you move day to day, but not that much. Ours was generally in the south, south east.

You know from the last time you locked on (always jot down the numbers) what height (azimith?) is… say 26 degrees. That changes too with movement, but again not much… and besides, when you flip it on to get set up to launch, if you wait a few minutes… that number is generated for you. So you then know the angle of aim.

All that’s left is to use the compass and, depending on the direction you are parked ( we always tried to park pointing in the direction that we knew our sat. was in because it makes for a quick find as soon as it’s up) all you have to do is raise to the angle specified (again, the internal GPS gives you that number) and then rotate the dish manually to your compass south east point about 5 degrees at a time while watching signal strength on you laptop screen. As soon as you find the highest signal strength, change degrees of movement to 1 or 2 and fine tune the search till you get the highest reading possible… probably takes at least a signal strength reading of at least 34 or above to “lock on”

you might need to fine tune elevation a half degree or so to get the best signal. As soon as your sig. strength goes over 34, communication, handshake and lock on proceeds automatically.

I got to where I could achieve lock on manually way faster that letting the motosat find it for me… usually around 4 minutes.

The funny thing was, was that the guys at motosat told me I would never be able to find it manually because it would want to lock on to another sat… the wrong one. and there was another sat that occasionally… when in some parts of the country fooled me… but you do it a while and find out that it doesn’t give you good signal strength and com. lights don’t chatter like they should… and you know to go a few degrees more in rotation.
We traveled for over a year doing it manually. Once in a while, I would try auto find, and it would search and search… I’m too impatient for that.
good luck guys. mark