Skewing Satellite Antenna for GOES (and others)

I live in Eastern NC and have a ground station to receive GOES-16 East.  No need to skew or tilt the disk.

However, I wanted to get GOES-17 West which requires some skew of the antenna to properly receive the signal.

 

 

First you need your stats.  Go to dishpointer.com and type in your address and the satellite you wish to track.

Awesome. Scroll to the bottom of the page that gets returned from the search and it will indicate Azimuth, Elevation, and required Skew.

Now we need to do some work on the antenna.

GOES Skew (click to enlarge)

Mine shows an LNB skew of 51 degrees.  So if you then go look at your attaching bracket it should have holes all around the mounting hole area.  Some mounts have more holes than others to achieve various amounts of skew.

Unless you have a ton of holes which permit for various degrees of skew just get as close as you can to the skew number.  In my case here 45 degrees is as good as I’m going to get.   Just a matter of getting some 10mm wrenches and moving everything over a hole or two.

NOTE:  It does not tell me WHICH way to skew but common sense tells me it is to the SW if I am on the East Coast.

Sweet. Now you should be able to aim your azimuth (with a real compass, not an iPhone compass) and set your elevation. You should then see a sweet looking signal at 1.6941 GHz that looks like this:

Then you are well on your way to doing this:

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