Our site in Rock Springs had suffered a number of outages due to a pretty badly damaged satellite dish.  I was able to purchase a replacement dish that would fit in the existing location without modifying the mounting structure.

UW88 outside of the transmitter building at the tower site…I have just finished unloading the dish from the truck.

The old dish has been removed…Quite a bit of damage to the paint.  Not as visible in this photo but quite apparent on a closer look are the dents from ice coming off the tower.  As I posted earlier, this dish was held together with hose clamps rather than the sturdy “U” bolts originally provided by the manufacturer.  It had been moved from another site to this one and I suspect those bolts had been lost in the shuffle.

The mounting post…It is actually level and quite sturdy.  The diameter of the existing post matches the requirements for the new dish.

  

One new 1.8 meter satellite dish–I have just finished attaching the Azimuth/Elevation mount to the back of the dish.  This is very similar to what I just did in Evanston only a bit bigger.

The satellite receiver (obviously) out of lock due to the old dish being disassembled.

Red lights for lock and status confirm the out of lock condition…

I have connected my laptop to the transmitter to provide a temporary audio source while I install the new dish.

The new dish is on the post and the feed is assembled.  The next step is pointing the dish to our satellite signal…

Numerous adjustments for azimuth and elevation–It is quite nice that this particular dish provides “fine” adjustments for both once the coarse positions are set.

Coarse indicator for elevation–this particular dish has an “offset” feed so I must do a slight bit of math to get the actual value.  All of this of course is “tweaked” for optimum performance using the indications on the spectrum analyzer and satellite receiver.

We have lock!  16.1 and 17.0…Not bad at all.  Again, I like to see these numbers around 15, no lower than 12.

Time to head back home.  This dish should provide at least 10-15 years or so of reliable service.